the @civicwhitaker anthology

@CivicWhitaker Anthology

Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at

the Smart Chicago Collaborative

CHRISTOPHER WHITAKER Edited by Daniel X. O’Neil

To those in the trenches. And to my wife Tara for jumping

in with me on this crazy ride.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood

and probably themselves will not be realized.

—Daniel Burnham

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge,

generally diffused through a community, are essential to the

preservation of a free government.

—General Sam Houston

Now, a lot of people have given up on government. And if you’re

one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things

are changing. Politics is not changing; government is changing.

— Jennifer Pahlka

/20

The @CivicWhitaker Anthology: Three years of organizing, writing, and document-ing in Chicago civic tech

by Christopher Whitaker and the Smart Chicago Collaborative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Based on a work at http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/.

Manufactured in the United States of America by the Smart Chicago Collaborative http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/ / @smartchicago The Chicago Community Trust 225 North Michigan Avenue Suite 2220 Chicago, IL 60601 (773) 960-6045

Made possible by funds from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust

Set in Scala and ScalaSans

Library of Congress Control Number [ applied for on Monday, September 21, 2015 ] ISBN: 978-0-9907752-1-8

First Printing, September 2015

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part One: The Chicago Civic Innovation Ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Chicago’s Civic Technology Ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The History of Civic Technology Events in Chicago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Part Two: How To . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20

Civic Tech 101 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

The Schoolcuts.org teams school us on how to build a civic app . . . . . . 27

How to run a civic hackathon . . . . . .30

How to run a Chi Hack Night- style event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

How to Blog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Live tweeting and using Twitter to boost your event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

Tech Tools for Civic Organizations . .49

Collaborative Project Management . . 54

Health and Human Services Primer .62

Safety and Justice Primer . . . . . . . . . 69

Transportation Primer . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Part Three: Wins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Smart Chicago and the City Tech Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79

Side effect of civic tech partnerships may be healthier communities . . . . . 85

Englewood Codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89

City of Chicago launches OpenETL Toolkit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92

Four Days After Divvy bike share launch an app prototype and an API presented at hack night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95

Largelots, a working app for Chicago neighborhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97

mRelief – Mobilizing social service relief in Chicago . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

The Chicago Area Red Cross shows us the power of open source . . . . . . . . 101

Aldertrack: Your Guide to the 2015 Chicago Elections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

The City of Chicago unveils predictive analytics model to find critical food safety violations faster . . . . . . . . . . .106

Does your building not recycle? Report it here! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109

Part Four: Lessons Learned . . . . . . 111

Lessons Learned from the CivicWorks Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Civic Tech events as learning opportunities, Hack Night and National Day of Civic Hacking . . . . . 120

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

Appendix A: An Incomplete List of Chicago Civic Technology Groups . . 122

Appendix B: Glossary of Civic Tech Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Contents

1

Hiring Christopher Whitaker to work as a consultant for Smart

Chicago was one of the best decisions I made here.

Together, we created a new job type— part documenter, part

organizer, part evangelist, part original writer and thinker about

an emerging subsector of the technology industry— civic tech.

Through our work together, he’s helped build one of the

strongest civic hacking communities in the country, been an

essential part of the growth of the largest network of civic tech

volunteers in the world, helped make the first weekend in June

a national day of civic hacking, worked with a dozen emerging

companies and organizations to grow revenue and impact,

and served as a critical thread in the national fabric of this

important movement.

This book is a simple anthology of the best of his vast work.

Daniel X. O’Neil

September 2015

Chicago

Introduction

Part One The Chicago Civic Innovation

Ecosystem

Here’s an introduction to Chicago’s civic

innovation ecosystem and some history of civic

innovation events in Chicago.

3

Chicago’s Civic Technology Ecosystem

This is the text of a speech I gave at the Civic Tech Forum in Tokyo,

Japan describing Chicago’s civic technology ecosystem. Much of the

work that’s been done in Chicago is possible because the ecosystem has

set up the space for success. I talk about the different parts and how they

work together.

Good afternoon, my name is Christopher Whitaker and I am a civic

technology consultant from Chicago. It is an honor to speak with

you today.

So first, a little about my hometown: Chicago is the third largest

city in the United States and we’re known for a few things. The first

is that we’re one of the coldest cities in the country – last winter

we had 658 mm of snow. We’re also known for the Chicago Cubs

with their 100 year losing streak. We also are the home to deep dish

pizza…. which comes to about 50mm of cheese, sauce and sausage.

Our skyline sits on the shores of Lake Michigan, which showcases

some of the best architecture in the county.

We’re also known for being a civic innovation powerhouse. Our

city has one of the biggest repositories of open data in the nation,

we have one of the biggest weekly gatherings of civic hackers world-

wide, and we are one of the most productive cities when it comes to

projects that leverage the power of technology in the service of the

public good.

We can do this because we’ve built an ecosystem design to power

civic innovation. I’d like to tell you a little about my story and the

story of our civic innovation ecosystem.

Part One

4 @CivicWhitaker Anthology

When I give my talks, I always like to ask how many developers

are in the room. People who code, know Ruby, have GitHub

Accounts. – Ok, so this is the part where I give out my deepest dark-

est secret that I am not a coder. I don’t know Python, I don’t know

R and if you let me into your production branch on Github – I will

destroy everything.

I came into civic technology from the opposite direction from a

lot of my peers.

It was early 2009 and the American economy was in the worst

recession in decades. Wall Street was crashing, houses were being

foreclosed, and unemployment was skyrocketing. As part of the

government’s response, the federal government gave money to state

governments to hire more bureaucrats to help process unemploy-

ment claims. I was hired by the State of Illinois in 2009 to work in

a field office.

So, my first day of work I arrive 30 minutes early. It’s early March

and so it’s still pretty cold in Chicago – and there is still a line of

about 20 people out the door. I get to my desk and boot up my

computer – and I wait about five minutes because the computer

is from 1995 – It’s got a big box monitor bigger than my head. I

finally pull up the system that I would be using to help my friends

and neighbors with their unemployment insurance…and I am

greeted by a DOS screen.

It’s got a green text, it sorta blinks at me. And I’m floored.

Turns out this system was from 1975. The system wasn’t a real

time system. So, when I did anything (enter in somebody’s claim

for unemployment insurance, made sure the system sent them a

check) – it didn’t actually happen until it ran through an overnight

process. The only way for me to know for certain if something I did

worked was to come in the next morning and print a ream of paper

about this thick (hand motion) – then go through line…by line…by

line… to make sure that nothing rejected. Because if it rejected and

5

nobody fixed it, the claimant would come in 3 days later asking us

“Hey! You told me you fixed it! There’s no money in my account –

now I can’t pay rent!”

At the same time, I’m carrying around an iPhone in my pocket.

Something 10 times more powerful that the system that I had to

use to help my neighbors with their unemployment and I’m using

the iPhone to watch cat videos on my way home. It was incredibly

frustrating because to me it should be the opposite. As a front

line public servant, I should have the best tools possible to help

residents. So, I started getting more into technology as a way to

try to find ways to do my job better. I started going to technology

events, to hackathons, and looking for ways to get involved.

After graduating with a Master’s of Public Administration

from DePaul University, I became a consultant for the Smart

Chicago Collaborative. Around the same time, I became one

of Code for America’s first Brigade Captains – and later became the

Brigade coordinator for the Midwest region. I also help to co-host

the Chi Hack Night in Chicago – the largest weekly gathering of

civic technologists in the United States. I’m extremely privileged

to be able be involved in so many of these efforts and to be part of

this community. Specifically, I’m proud to represent Chicago’s civic

innovation community.

In the past few years, we’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit.

Some examples of our recent wins include a site called Largelots.

org. Because of the recession, Chicago has had a lot of abandoned

buildings. The City tears the buildings down then takes ownership

of the lot – which the city doesn’t like to do because it’s just sitting

there. Teamwork Englewood, a community organization on

Chicago’s south side, worked with the city and a local civic technol-

ogy company called DataMade to build a site that let’s people buy

these vacant lots for one dollar.

Part One


For another project, Smart Chicago worked with a local youth

organization called Mikva Challenge to build an app (Expunge.io) to

make it easier for people to get their juvenile records erased so that

it’s easier for people to find jobs and apply to university.

Smart Chicago also worked with our city health department to

build an app that listens to Twitter for reports of food poisoning. So,

if I eat somewhere and tweet that I’m sick, the Health Department

will tweet me back asking for more information. That becomes a

city service request and the city will send a restaurant inspector

to that restaurant. We’ve done quite a bit of work – and we expect

that work to continue as the community aims to take on bigger and

more complex projects.

A big part of why we’re able to have as much impact as we do is

because we have built a civic innovation ecosystem. This ecosystem

acts as an engine that helps power civic innovation and produce

not only civic applications – but a more transparent government,

non-profit community organizations are a more technologically

savvy, more civic technology companies, and much more connected

network of people who understand the dual challenges of both

technology and government.

Each of these different parts complements the other. The City of

Chicago provides the data that powers the engine. The Chi Hack

Night provides the place for talent and collaboration. The Smart

Chicago Collaborative provides institutional support.

And then, all of Chicago’s efforts then get shared with the Code

for America Brigade Network – which helps us collaborate on a

global scale. I’d like to explain a little bit about each part in more

detail.

First up, The City of Chicago likes to focus on the data. They

view data as fuel: fuel for transparency, fuel for innovation, and fuel

for businesses.

7

To help facilitate this, the city has undergone the process of

linking all of their business system’s directly to the city’s data portal.

So, when the city fills a pothole – the information is automatically

uploaded to the data portal where it can be used by civic technolo-

gists. On the city employee side, they aren’t doing anything

different – there’s no additional step they have to take. The

OpenETL toolkit does the work automatically. The city has open

sourced the OpenETL toolkit on GitHub – so other municipalities

can do the same thing.

But, the most important thing the city does to help the ecosystem

is their participation in the community. This is Chicago’s Chief

Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr at one of our Chi Hack Nights. Schenk

is a regular attendee at the hack night and so when the community

has questions about city data or needs a particular data set, we can

simply ask him directly. The Chief Data Officer is also on Twitter at

@ChicagoCDO – so anyone can reach out to him and ask ques-

tions. This community involvement is a necessity – it allows the city

to respond to the community’s data needs.

The next part of the civic innovation ecosystem that I want to talk

about it people. None of these efforts that I’ve talked about work

without people to come up with ideas, to build them, and to help

implement them. And I’m not just talking about web developers –

I’m also talking about city employees, designers, non-profit employ-

ees, data scientists, journalists – they’re all needed to make our civic

apps the best they can be.

The way we recruit people into our civic innovation space is

through the Chi Hack Night. The Chi Hack Night was spun out

of the OpenGov Chicago monthly meetup. The OpenGov Chicago

Meetup was started in 2009 as a way to promote transparency in

government. Once the City of Chicago began opening up their data,

the challenge became “OK… so what do we do with all of this data?”

The OpenGov Chicago meetups were a great place for talk – but not

Part One


a great place to get things done. The city had started to host a series

of hackathons, but we quickly discovered that hackathons were

great for meeting other civic hackers but we really couldn’t produce

anything of quality at the hackathons.

So, Derek Eder started the Chi Hack Night – a weekly event

for everyone to get together and work on civic apps and I started

co-hosting a few months later. We’ve been doing the event for three

years and it’s become the place to talk about projects, challenges,

and to meet like-minded people. We average about 80 people a

week and have had up to 120 people at an event. If you want to

learn about the civic technology space in Chicago – this is where

you go. The most important part about building this community is

making sure that everyone feels welcome and invited – not just the

technologists – but community activists as well. Part of what I do at

hack night is teaching the Civic Hacking 101 class so that it helps

lower the barrier to entry. Nobody should feel intimidated when

they come to join our community.

And it’s very important to get everyone – all types of people –

into the community. All of these wins that I spoke about earlier –

only exist because we had a partnership form between the technolo-

gists and the people who are working in front-line organizations to

help try to solve civic problems. The largelots.org project was spear-

headed not by the coder – but rather the community organization

that wanted to solve the problem of vacant lots inside their neigh-

borhood. Expunge.io came about from a partnership between the

legal aid foundation and a non-profit youth organization. There’s

an entire community organizing aspect to our work that provides

tremendous value to what we do.

But that’s a hard thing to do on a volunteer basis. There are only

so many hours in a day to do this work if you’re also working a full-

time job. With a team of volunteers, it’s easy to get small wins. For

example, creating a searchable map of all the places where you can

9

get a flu shot online. However, to do something more complicated

and more complex – it requires people working full time. Being

able to do that requires considerable funding.

In 2007, the MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Community

Trust, and the City of Chicago put together a report called the “City

that Networks” The leadership of these organizations recognized

that the digital revolution was poised to change the way that cities

functioned. The leadership came together to find a way to set Chi-

cago up for success. To do this, they decided that Chicago needed a

center of gravity of civic innovation. That organization became the

Smart Chicago Collaborative. The three organizations sit on its lead-

ership board with the organization itself being houses as an initia-

tive of the Chicago Community Trust. We receive funding from the

MacArthur Foundation, and the City of Chicago sits on our board.

Because we have funding, the Smart Chicago Collaborative is

able to hire consultants to build civic apps, meet with partners, and

provide advice to other community organizations.

We’re also able to add capacity to the ecosystem. Anyone who

builds a civic app in Chicago can have it hosted by the Smart

Chicago Collaborative for free. We also provide free user testing and

access to developer tools like Twilio and Mapbox.

We’ve even been able to add capacity to our county government.

Cook County wanted to hire a staff member to help open up their

data. However, because of budget restraints they could not afford

to hire somebody of adequate talent. So, Smart Chicago and Cook

County split the difference enabling Kalov Strategies to start

opening up Cook County data.

We have also been able to team up with World Business

Chicago and neighborhood community organizations to help

close the digital divide in Chicago through our Connect Chicago

Challenge program.

Part One


This is only possible because we have the institutional support to

help fund our efforts.

The other major activity that we do is writing about our work and

to tell our story. Every week, I live stream the Chi Hack Night and

blog about the presentations. I also write how-to guides and lessons

learned to help newer civic innovators in the space. In the three

years that I’ve been doing this for Smart Chicago, we’ve put togeth-

er over 400 blog posts about civic innovation and have over 300

videos on YouTube. We’ve also written books about our work.

We do this because when other cities ask us how we did some-

thing, we want to be able to tell the story and to be helpful. As much

work as we’ve done in this space, civic technology is still a fairly

new field. None of this existed ten years ago. It’s something that

none of us went to school for. We’ve had to learn all of this through

experience and doing the work. So, it’s very important for us to

write down what worked, what didn’t, and what we were thinking

at the time so that when others try and start their own projects they

can learn from us.

And that brings me to the fourth part of the ecosystem – the net-

work. While I serve as the Code for America Brigade Captain for the

City of Chicago – I’m just one of many civic innovators in a global

network. The network allows me to share stories about the work

we’ve done with thousands of civic innovators across the globe.

The real power of this network is it allows us to collaborate and

exponentially expand our knowledge base. This is particularly

useful for small or newer communities that are just starting out.

Instead of having to do things on their own, they can literally go

online and ask hundreds of civic innovators a question and get

replies within minutes. Because odds are out of the 157 brigades,

you are not the only one to have encountered a specific problem.

We learn from the network and they learn from us.

11

This has also helped to scale the civic innovation movement in a

very short amount of time. Each new city starts out with the lessons

learned from 150 other cities including Code for Japan based right

here in Tokyo.

So, I’ve given you an overview of how we built the civic innova-

tion ecosystem in Chicago. Now, I want to show you what that

allows us to do with an example of a civic startup that has come

out of Chicago. This here is Rose Arfyie, the founder of mRelief.

mRelief is a website that allows users to find out what social

services they’re eligible for.

Social services in Chicago can be difficult to navigate because

the social safety net is so complex. Social services are administered

by multiple governmental and non-profit organizations each with

their own set of qualifications. There’s no one stop shop for social

services – you have to apply at each agency separately, which can

take a lot of time. It’s a big problem.

The start of this effort was when the Mayor’s office came to Chi

Hack Night to talk about the problem set. Their representatives

from the Mayor’s office met with Rose. Rose and other participants

came up with the idea for mReleif.

With the funding, Rose was able to go full time and hire two

additional team members. mRelief used Smart Chicago’s Twillio

account to enable texting for the app and then went through user

testing to ensure the app was working as designed.

Because Smart Chicago works so closely with Code for America,

one of the first things that we did was to introduce mRelief to Code

for America’s health team. Code for America’s health focus team

has worked extensively with social service issues and with creating

apps that text – much like what mRelief is trying to do. This

consultation helped to improve mRelief.

Part One


Once mRelief launched, they presented their work at OpenGov

Hack Night – which Smart Chicago live streamed and blogged

about it – helping to share their work nationally.

Later, when Code for America wanted to focus on food stamps

for one of their Code Across Challenges – they reached out to

mRelief to help run the challenge.

As you can see, the network allowed mRelief to amplify their

efforts – and in return, Code for America’s health team and Brigade

network were able learn from their experience.

mRelief has been a big success in Chicago and Smart Chicago is

proud to be awarding them another $15,000 in funding to support

their work. (Since the time of the speech, mRelief has also gone on

to receive more grants from other non-profits and has provided paid

services to the City of Chicago.)

As you can see, the ecosystem helps accelerate projects like mRe-

lief and the network helps to amplify our work.

13

The History of Civic Technology Events in Chicago

When Chi Hack Night gets visitors from other cities, one of the

first things that gets noticed is its size. Chi Hack Night is now

consistently reaching attendance numbers of 80 to 120 people

and has featured speakers such as Chicago CIO Brenna Berman,

WBEZ’s Linda Lutton, the University of Chicago’s Charlie Catlett

and more. Currently there have been 173 hack nights and counting!

Chi Hack Night didn’t grow this way overnight. Chi Hack Night

is one part of a larger community that’s been growing in Chicago as

early as April 2009.

It’s sometimes easy to think that civic apps are a new phenom-

ena, but there have been people building civic apps long before it

became cool. Adrian Holovaty created chicagocrime.org in 2005.

(Holovaty would end up founding Everyblock along with Dan

O’Neil who would later become the Executive Director of Smart

Chicago.)

In 2005, Dan O’Neil also launched CTA Alerts to help riders

communicate about issues with the CTA. In 2009, Harper Reed

(who would later be the CTO of Obama for America) created an

unofficial CTA API.

This post aims to talk a little about the history of civic technology

and open governments groups in Chicago and where the move-

ment is going from here.

The 8 Principals of OpenDataWhile this meeting didn’t happen in Chicago, one of the earliest

meetings of this movement occurred on December 7th, 2007 in

Part One


Sebastopol, California. Carl Malamud and Tim O’Reilly organized

the meeting with the goal of establishing principals of open data

and with attendees including Lawrence Lessig, Tom Steinberg,

Bradley Horowitz and more. The meeting had a significant

Chicago presence including Adrian Holovaty, Dan O’Neil,

Karl Fogel, and Aaron Swartz.

The meeting laid down the 8 Principals of OpenData, which

would later help influence open data policies nationwide.

OpenGov Chicago - April 2007OpenGov Chicago(-land) meetup group was founded in April of

2007 by Joe Germuska and Daniel O’Neil. The group boasts one of

the largest continuities google groups about open government in

the country. It’s first meeting on Meetup was a social event at Clark

Street Ale House. The meetup group was created for citizens who

are interested in seeing their federal, state, and local government

function more efficiently and responsively. The group is inspired by

people who are actively building tools and experimenting with solu-

tions along these lines, like the Sunlight Foundation and GovTrack.

The group stated right on the home page that it believes that open

source software practices and internet culture provide good exam-

ples of how people can work cooperatively on complex problems to

produce meaningful results, but you don’t have to be a techie to be

part of this meetup.

It’s worth nothing that OpenGov Chicago stated flat out that you

don’t have to be a techie to be part of the Meetup. This distinction is

important as it helped set the tone that the community here is open.

Independent Government Observers Task ForceOne of the first open government events happened in Chicago on

August 4th, 2008. The IGOTF Non-Conference brought together

CEOs, professors, and nonprofit executives involved in placing case

15

law on the Internet for free access. That meeting was extremely

productive in introducing players to each other in a series of

cooperative efforts.

Illinois Data Exchange AffiliatesOne of the other early incarnations of open government groups was

the Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates (IDEA). a voluntary coalition of

government agencies and nonprofit organizations working to im-

prove and facilitate public access to public data through web-based

XML data transfer. Led by Greg Sanders and Justin Massa, the

group met regularly and was eventually merged with the OpenGov

Chicago meetup group.

CityCamp 2010 - ChicagoThe very first CityCamp was held in Chicago in 2010 at the Uni-

versity of Illinois’ Chicago Innovation Center. CityCamp originally

emerged from Transparency Camp and the Gov20 Camp. (Here’s

a google doc featuring the meeting notes from that Transparency

Camp that spawned CityCamp.)

At this meeting, Jen Pahlka presented about Code for America -

an idea which would grow into a massive international organization

with countless people in it’s network and a ton of work.

CityCamp itself would also grow into it’s own brand with dozens

of events happening around the world.

data .cityofchicago .org, Apps for Metro Chicago and Urban Geek DrinksWith the election of Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago, things

began to change quickly. One of the Mayor’s first acts was to sign an

Open Data Executive Order that set the city on the path to opening

up their data. John Tolva was hired as the city’s first Chief Technolo-

gy Office and Brett Goldstein was hired as the city’s first Chief Data

Part One


Officer. The Department of Innovation and Technology

not only published data to the portal, but they hooked up their

business systems directly to the portal so that data sets would

update automatically.

Brett Goldstein recruited people from the OpenGov Chicago

meetup and other technologists to form the “Nerd Herd” - an

informal group of people who would meet regularly to talk about

technology issues affecting the city.

At the time, there hadn’t been many civic apps created in part

because there was no data to fuel them. (You had to either get the

data through a Freedom of Information Act or just create the data

yourself.) As part of the city’s strategy, the City partnered with the

Metro Chicago Information Center to run the Apps for Metro Chi-

cago Contest to help kickstart projects that used newly opened city,

county, and state data.

As part of the yearlong event, MCIC held several hackathons at

Google’s Chicago headquarters. The content would inject a lot of

energy into the community and resulted in the creation of 52 civic

apps. The winner, SpotHero, has gone on to become a major

Chicago startup and recently just completed a $20 million dollar

funding round.

The other big event that was happening at this time was an

informal monthly gathering hosted by Justin Massa called Urban

Geek Drinks. The venue provided an enormous networking

opportunity where people with an interest in civic issues and

technology could meet and talk.

Code for America Fellowship, Connect Chicago, and OpenGov Hack NightIn 2012, Chicago became a Code for America Fellowship City

with the task of creating an Open311 interface for the City of

Chicago with Smart Chicago Collaborative providing funding. At

17

the same time, Smart Chicago was helping to administer the city’s

Broadband Technology Opportunity Grant and starting to host the

Connect Chicago Meetup for people interested in closing the digital

divide in Chicago.

Post Apps for Metro Chicago, there continued to be an interest in

civic hackathons including two “Idea Hack Chicago” events hosted

by Veronica Ludwig, Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov in part-

nership with Code for America as part of their fellowship year.

One of the teams that formed during the very first Google

Hackathon for Apps for Metro Chicago contest was Open City - first

founded by Paul Baker, Chad Pry, Nick Rougeux, Ryan Briones and

Derek Eder. Their entry, Chicagolobbyists.org, was one of the first

civic apps to make use of open data and had a great reception when

released. The volunteer group had continued to build apps even

after the contest, but found it difficult do complete work outside of

their 9-5 jobs without experiencing hackathon fatigue. Derek Eder

and Juan Pablo-Valez had an idea to create a weekly hack night

event as a space to work on their projects.

On March 22nd, Derek Eder and Juan Pablo-Valez hosted the first

OpenGov Hack Night at offices of Webitects. A few months

later, Code for America would launch the Brigade Program that

would strive to harness volunteer energy around civic technology.

Christopher Whitaker applied and was accepted as the Chicago

Brigade Captain with a plan to support existing work and try and

network resources within the community. At the same time,

Whitaker joined Smart Chicago as a consultant and was paid to

attend hack night and document the movement. At that point, Derek

Eder had left Webitects to start his own civic tech development shop

Datamade with Smart Chicago being their first client working on

projects like the Chicago Health Atlas and Chicago Early Learning.

Over the next few weeks, OpenGov Hack Night would continue to

grow and quickly outgrow the offices at Webitects. Through Smart

Part One


Chicago’s founding membership at 1871, OpenGov Hack Night

moved to the IMSA classroom where it would say for the next few

years. (Smart Chicago would provide a number of keys to civic

technologists over the next few years.)

Several apps that used data to tell stories about the city was

featured in the Chicago Architecture Foundation exhibit “City of

Big Data” which uses interactive displays to display different aspects

of city data.

Over the next few years, OpenGov Hack Night would grow and

serve as a model for groups around the country. The space would

outgrow even 1871 and move to the offices of Braintree where they

are now. As part of the move, they changed their name to Chi Hack

Night to reflect caring about more than just open government. Der-

ek Eder and Christopher Whitaker now run chi Hack Night along

with a volunteer leadership council with members running their

own breakout groups within Chi Hack Night.

Fewer, but more focused hackathonsAs regular gatherings of civic technologists became the new

normal, it had the effect of reducing the number of hackathons.

Instead of having one every weekend, there were fewer but more

focused hackathons. Smart Chicago helped to run several of these

particularly around National Day of Civic Hacking. Chicago’s early

success at National Day of Civic Hacking would result in a partner-

ship with organizing organizations like SecondMuse and Code for

America to provide training material for newer communities.

Other such events included the Geeks Without Bounds “Every-

one Hacks” event at Groupon. The hackathon, co-hosted by Chicago

Women in Developers, was specifically targeted towards getting

more women into the tech space. After the event, Chi Hack Night

saw an increase in the diversity of it’s attendees.

19

Another event that’s grown over the years is the Center for

Neighborhood Technologies Urban Sustainability Apps competition

that connects coders, designers, and developers with community

leaders and representatives to solve neighborhood problems.

Other groupsAs the community has grown there have been other groups that

have formed to help bring together people around the intersec-

tion of technology and civic lift. These include the City Data Users

Group, Maptime Chicago, the Chicago Data Visualization Group,

and more.

Part One


Part Two How To

Civic tech is new. Simple posts that

directly document how to do big things were a

major part of my beat.

21

Civic Tech 101

A large part of my work with Smart Chicago involved covering Chi Hack

Night (formerly OpenGov Hack Night). By being paid to go to Chi Hack

Night it enabled me to take a much greater part in the event. (Before, I

would run from my office on Chicago’s north side and race downtown to

make the event in time.) It also meant being able to be one of the more

productive Code for America Brigade Captains since I could wake up in

the morning and think only about civic tech things instead of a different

day job. This is the talk that I developed when I was starting off as a

co-organizer.

When I start out this talk, I always like to ask how many devel-

opers are in the room. People who code, know Ruby, have GitHub

Accounts. That’s because I’m not a coder. I don’t know Python,

I don’t know R and if you let me into your production branch on

Github – I will destroy everything.

I came into civic technology from the opposite direction from a

lot of my peers.

It was early 2009 and the American economy was in the worst

recession in decades. Wall Street was crashing, houses were being

foreclosed, and unemployment was skyrocketing. As part of the

government’s response, the federal government gave money to state

governments to hire more bureaucrats to help process unemploy-

ment claims. I was hired by the State of Illinois in 2009 to work in

a field office.

So, on my first day of work I arrive 30 minutes early. It’s early

March and so it’s still pretty cold in Chicago – and there is still a

line of about 20 people out the door. I get to my desk and boot up

my computer – and I wait about five minutes because the computer

is from 1995 – It’s got a big box monitor bigger than my head. I

finally pull up the system that I would be using to help my friends

Part Two


and neighbors with their unemployment insurance…and I am

greeted by a DOS screen.

This system has green text and it sort of just blinks at me. And

I’m floored. It turns out this system was from 1975. The system

wasn’t a real time system. So, when I did anything (enter in some-

body’s claim for unemployment insurance, made sure the system

sent them a check) – it didn’t actually happen until it ran through

an overnight process. The only way for me to know for certain if

something I did worked was to come in the next morning and print

a ream of paper – then go through line…by line…by line… to make

sure that nothing rejected. Because if it rejected and nobody fixed

it, the claimant would come in 3 days later asking us “Hey! You told

me you fixed it! There’s no money in my account – now I can’t pay

rent!”

At the same time, I’m carrying around an iPhone in my pocket.

The iPhone was 10 times more powerful that the system that I

had to use to help my neighbors with their unemployment and I’m

using the to watch cat videos on my way home. It was incredibly

frustrating because to me it should be the opposite. As a front line

public servant, I should have the best tools possible to help resi-

dents. So, I started getting more into technology as a way to try to

find ways to do my job better. I started going to technology events,

to hackathons, and looking for ways to get involved.

After graduating with a Master’s of Public Administration from

DePaul University, I became a consultant for the Smart Chicago

Collaborative. Around the same time, I became one of Code for

America’s first Brigade Captains – and later became the Brigade

coordinator for the Midwest region. I also help to co-host the Open-

Gov Hack Night in Chicago – one of the largest weekly gatherings

of civic technologists in the United States.

23

Data as Fuel / Civic Hacking in a NutshellThe next part of the 101 Class is about open data. If you want to custom-

ize your talk, you can change the talk to fit your municipality. If your

city doesn’t have an open data policy, then you can either use Chicago or

another city as an example – or talk about you can crowd source open

data – but for now the point is to explain what open data is and why it’s

important.

It used to be that in Chicago, figuring out what the government

was doing meant filling out a Freedom of Information Act Request

(FOIA). You’d fill the form out, wait a couple days or weeks and

then you’d either get a CD with a bunch of excel files on them or

worse case scenario – a PDF. And the PDF doesn’t do you any good

because you can’t stuff the PDF inside Excel to run analysis on it.

That was playing the civic hacking game on hard.

In 2011, the City of Chicago implemented an open data policy

stating that the city should start opening data in a way that was

free for people to use, available to everyone, without any expensive

proprietary software. (Following the 8 Principles of Open Data)

To do that, the City launched their data portal at data.cityofchica-

go.org using the Socrata platform. The site let’s us search for data

straight from the home page. In Chicago, the City’s Department of

Innovation and Technology uses an OpenETL Tooklit to link their

business systems to the open data portal. So when a city employee

does anything – tow a car, inspect a restaurant, fill a pothole –

the information is automatically loaded onto the data portal.

But, as great as the data portal is – it’s still a giant spreadsheet in

the sky. It’s not the user-friendliest way to get information.

Take the data about towed cars. That’s a lot of license plates to

go through. A local civic hacker named Scott Robbin created a site

called wasmycartowed.com that’s a single sentence. You put in your

license plate number and the site will tell you if your car was towed

and how to get it back.

Part Two


That’s civic hacking in a nutshell. It’s taking data from the

government and using it to solve a civic problem or educate the

public about a civic issue. There are all kinds of apps that operate

on that same principle.

Part Three: Collaborative Civic Hacking with Open SourceOpen source and GitHub can get pretty technical sounding and it’s a

little intimidating since a lot of programmers tend to work from the

terminal – which is foreign to most users. In this part of the 101 class,

we mainly want to focus on what open source is an why it’s important.

Don’t try to teach the ins and outs of GitHub all at once – that’s a lesson

for another day. You should refer people to local experts or GitHub’s

YouTube page for the really technical questions you may get. Instead, try

to use an example to show why open source is important.

The other big thing you’ll hear civic hacking talk about is the

concept of open source and a website called GitHub.

Do you remember test time at school? You weren’t allowed to

look on anyone else’s paper, you weren’t allowed to ask questions

about how something worked, and you most certainly couldn’t copy

anyone else’s work. This is closed source.

With open source, all of these things are allowed (to a point).

Open source software and the GitHub platform allow us to work

very collaboratively. My favorite example of this is the Chicago /

Boston flu shot app. During one of the first Chicago OpenGov Hack

Nights, the Chicago Department of Public Health came to hack

night asking about a way to make it easier for people to find flu

shots. Tom Kompare, a local web developer, then created the

Chicago Flu Shot app that allowed people to use their phones to

find flu shots near them. A few weeks after the app launched, the

City of Boston declared a public health emergency because the flu

had gotten so bad in Boston.

25

Harlan Weber, the Code for Boston Brigade Captain, shot our

group and email asking about the flu shot app. Tom and Code for

Boston got connected and the Code for Boston team used a GitHub

feature called a “fork” to create their own copy of the flu shot app.

They modified it to match the City of Boston and had their app

rolled out to the public in less than 36 hours.

But the story doesn’t stop there – when the Code for Boston team

deployed the app they also made some improvements to the app.

They then went back to the Tom and said “Hey, Tom – we made

some changes and we think you’ll like them. We’d like you to pull

our changes into your app.” This is called a pull request and we use

them to work collaboratively.

Part Four: Break for QuestionsWith going through both open source and open data, it’s a lot of tech to

throw at people in such a short about of time. This is a good point to stop

and allow for questions.

Part Five: Community organizing as being vital to Civic TechA large part of our work involves community organizing and collab-

oration. The easiest way to explain this is through an example.

Admittedly, we are a geeky bunch. But, if we’re geeks buildings

things for geeks we’re not always solving the problem. In a lot of

our projects, we try to partner with either a government agency,

non-profit organization, subject matter expert or community activist

to help ensure our apps meet the needs and challenges of those in

the trenches working to solve civic problems on an everyday basis.

One example of this is schoolcuts.org. In this case, civic hackers

at hack night were hearing from Chicago Public School parents

who wanted more information about the impending school closing.

CPS had released data about each school on the closing list, but

Part Two


the information was scattered across different websites and PDF

documents.

The problem was compounded when Chicago Public School

announced the list. Not only were certain schools closing, but also

some schools were having their locations changed. For parents, this

meant that even if their school had been saved from the chopping

block – their routes to school would still change. The schoolcuts.org

team saw an opportunity to use build a site that clearly displayed

the data around the school closing issue in a way that was easy for

parents to understand.

Because team members already had connections to concerned

parent groups, the team was able to understand the needs of the

community and build the site around their needs.

As they built the site, the team kept going back to the parent

groups in order to get feedback on the site to make improvements

to the site – including translating the site to Spanish.

It’s this community organizing aspect that’s the driving force

behind civic apps that truly make impact.

The final thing that I do is a call to action. This could mean asking

people to join your hack night, to break out into working groups, or

come to one of your events. For Chicago’s Chi Hack Night, I normally

encourage people to join our discussion board or head over to one of our

breakout groups.

I also use the opportunity to answer any more questions that group

may have.

27

The Schoolcuts .org teams school us on how to build a

civic app

One of the prime examples of putting people first when developing civic

apps was schoolcuts.org.

May 21st, 2013

Since schoolcuts.org first launched two months ago, the team has

been working around the clock to add new features and information

to the site.

One of the weakness of the civic hacking movement is a tendency

to launch a new civic app based on some newly released data set and

then never touch the app or the issue again.

It is a rare instance when a civic problem can be solved by one

simple app release – particularly when the civic problem is some-

thing large and complicated like crime, sustainability, or education.

So while the schoolcuts team launched their app two months

ago, they have continued to add more information and features to

the site as questions continued around the issue of school closings

in Chicago. (Most recently, they’ve translated the site into Spanish.)

The team presented at Chi Hack Night about how they went

about building the app in three separate acts.

Act One: The ProblemThe team started with the problem. (Not the data set) In this case,

the team was hearing from Chicago Public School parents who

wanted more information about the impending school closing.

CPS had released data about each school on the closing list, but

Part Two


the information was scattered across different websites and PDF

documents.

The problem was compounded when Chicago Public School

announced the list. Not only were certain schools closing, but some

schools were having their locations changed. For parents, this

meant that even if their schools weren’t closing – their routes to

school would still change.

Additionally, the school attendance boundaries were not match-

ing what Chicago Public Schools had designated to be the receiving

schools. In effect, your oldest child may be going to a different

elementary school that your youngest when they reach school age.

Further, the criteria used to closed schools used an additional

value added system that further confused parents and community

members.

Act Two: OpportunityThe schoolcuts.org team saw an opportunity to use build a site that

clearly displayed the data around the school closing issue in a way

that was easy for parents to understand.

Because team members already had connections to concerned

parent groups, the team was able to understand the needs of the

community and build the site around their needs.

Act Three: Solutions and ChallengesTo help parents, the team decided to try and ensure that the user

experience was very localized to their school.

The site not only displays the data around school closings, but

also does a good job of explaining what the terms mean.

Since their launch, the team has continued to add features such

as a simple way to compare closing schools with receiving schools

and has translated the site into Spanish.

29

The schoolcuts team shows the right way to approach civic apps.

They address a community concern using open data and educate

the public about the issue.

Part Two


How to run a civic hackathon

As part of my work with the Smart Chicago I’ve run several civic

hackathons including several National Day of Civic Hacking events

in Chicago. Starting in 2014, I wrote a post on how I organize and

set up these events. I also wanted to go over tips and hazards to look

out for when organizing these events.

First off, hackathons are good for some things and not for others…There are some common critiques of hackathons that result from a

misunderstanding on what civic hackathons are good for. We also

want to differentiate between regular industry ‘hackathons’ that can

double as marketing events and civic hackathons that have a much

different purpose.

Hackathons are a tool for community organizing or organizing

around a specific problem set.

Hackathons are not useful for:

• Building fully finished apps: The “Oh, let’s have a hackathon

to build an app to solve all our problems!” type of hackathon

generally flops because a weekend isn’t enough time to build a

finished fully capable product.

• Getting people to use YOUR product: The “Oh, let’s have a

hackathon and get people to use our platform to get more cus-

tomers!” generally isn’t a good idea. Even with a prize for the

best use of your tool, you aren’t really hosting a civic hackathon.

You’re hosting a marketing event. Not that there’s anything

wrong with that, but when you do this you are missing the

point of hosting the civic hackathon in the first place. (Which

should be spur civic innovation to solve social problems.)

31

• Building a very specific app that meets your very specific needs:

The “We really want this, let’s order a bunch of pizza, hold a

hackathon and have them do something!” is counter-produc-

tive. If you have a scope of work and know what you want, just

hire somebody.

On the other hand, civic hackathons are useful if you want to:

• Organize people around specific problem set and brainstorm-

ing ideas: “We want to make our city sustainable. Let’s get the

environmental affairs people together with the technologists ”

type of hackathon.

• If you have a particular problem and a particular set of resources

you can throw at it, a hackathon can help brainstorm ideas about

how to address the problem. Keep in mind, this hackathon only

works if you have subject matter experts *and* the technologists

talking together.

• Organize to recruit people into the civic innovation community:

The “there are not enough women/non-profits/journalists at

our hack nights” type of hackathon. Hackathons can be great

recruiting tools to get more people into your community.

Granted, these types of hackathons are built for beginners and

have more of a training element to them.

• Test out a new civic dataset or API: The “Ok, we finally got this

dataset out.. now what can we do with it” type of hackathon.

Fair warning: the data in it of itself won’t be enough. You’ll need

to have subject matter experts on hand to help explain what the

data is actually showing. For example, if you’ve released a new

food inspection data set you should have somebody from the

health department on hand to explain the details. (People are

not good guessers). These types of events are good for seeing

the types of projects that can be done with your new data set

or API.

Part Two


We want to start off planning for the hackathon by asking, “What is

it you want to accomplish?” That also leads us to a major point in

having a successful hackathon.

Having a plan to carry on the work after the event .While civic hackathons are a great organizing tool, they don’t always

result in fully finished and tested civic apps. For that, other efforts

need to be made to carry the work forward.

When thinking about your event, you should keep in mind hav-

ing a plan for carrying the work forward. Does this mean starting

your own weekly hack night? (So you can continue to work on apps

started at the event a little bit at a time.) Does this mean finding

grant funding to support the development of larger apps? (Using

the hackathon to show the potential of these apps.) Don’t discount

the power of small wins – particularly when your local civic innova-

tion community is just starting out.

Hackathons can be a great spark to larger efforts. With that

pre-text in mind, here’s the Smart Chicago approach to hackathons.

First, start with a problem:Civic hackathons work best when focused on a specific problem set.

The best way to highlight these problems is to bring in a subject

matter expert who deals with the problem on an everyday basis.

What to do a hackathon about crime? Better call the police depart-

ment. Want to do something around housing? Recruit somebody

from the local housing authority or somebody who runs a shelter.

When trying to think about the needs and challenge of the front

line, there’s no substitute for somebody who actually works in the

front line to speak at your event.

You also shouldn’t wait until the day of the event to provide your

participants with resources. By providing a resource list ahead of

time (like this one we put together for the Chicago Police Depart-

33

ment Safer Communities Hackathon) it helps get participants better

prepare for the event. Hackathons may have challenge components,

but that doesn’t mean everyone absolutely has to start from scratch.

Getting an agenda togetherYour agenda will vary depending on the goal of your hackathon and

it’s something that you should determine early on in your planning.

There’s a temptation to have hackathons become two-day sprints

with participants getting little to no sleep. However, if the goal of

the hackathon is to develop prototypes versus fully working apps

– you may not need really need to make a coffee run at 2 in the

morning.

The formats for our event tend to follow this general flow

depending on what we’re trying to accomplish:

• 7:00am Event organizers arrive to help set up.

• 7:30am Food/Coffee/Water arrives

• 8:00am Breakfast

• 8:30am Welcome (“Hi, welcome! Here’s the wifi password, the

bathrooms are over there.”)

• 8:45am Education (“Here’s what we’ve done so far, here are

some resources”)

• 9:00am Problem Set (“Here’s the problem I’m facing in the

day-to-day”)

• 10:00am Q & A (“Would this be helpful?” “How does this

activity work?”)

• 10:15am Break out to form teams and hack!

• 12:00pm Lunch served

4:00pm Hacking ends, judging begins (if applicable)

4:30pm Project winners announced (If applicable)

Part Two


Variations on this include having the talking portion of the event

happen on a Friday night. (This is particularly helpful if you’re

trying to have working prototypes by the end of the event.) This

allows for a full day (or full two days) of hack time.

If we’re doing more of an unconference event, the format will go

something like this:

• 7:00 am Event organizers arrive to help set up.

• 7:30 am Food/Coffee/Water arrives

• 8:00 am Breakfast

• 8:30 am Welcome (“Hi, welcome! Here’s the wifi password, the

bathrooms are over there.”)

• 8:45 am unConference 101 (“Here’s how unconferences work”)

• 9:00 am Icebreaker (“Everyone is going to form a line based on

a statement. If you agree head to the right, disagree head to the

left. OK, the weather is too cold!”)

• 9:30 am Throw session ideas on the board, vote, assign rooms

• 10:00 am First Session

• 11:00 am Second Session

• 12:00 pm Lunch served (Throw out and vote on afternoon

sessions)

• 1:00 pm Third Session

• 2:00 pm Forth Session

• 3:00 pm Group Returns & Report backs (Here’s what we talked

about)

These are just general examples and in the course of running

the event you may find yourself running a bit behind. We always

assume that things are going to run over by about 15 mins and just

prepare accordingly. (We sometimes use the lunch hour to make up

for time.)

35

Next, make sure you recruit a diverse set of participantsOnce you have an agenda, it’s time to Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!

People can get pretty busy and people can get even busier during

the summer. In order to get people to your event you’ll need to start

early. You can use your local organization’s email lists, social media

accounts, contacts with local universities, companies, and news

media to help spread the word.

The other thing you’ll want to make sure of is that you recruit

a diverse pool of participants. Reaching out to groups like the

Chicago Women in Developers can be super-useful in doing this.

Additionally, you’ll also want to make sure you have a diverse skill

set at your event.

The best teams at hackathons are comprised of a mix of skillsets

including developers, user interface designers, data scientists, and

subject matter experts.

There are a few strategies you can use to try to get a diverse

group of people to your event including reaching out to Meetup

groups (like the Northern Illinois PHP group or the Chicago Inter-

active Design & Development Group), contacting web development

schools like DevBootcamp, and talking to local universities.

There’s a few ways that you can do registration for the event.

For our groups, we like to use Meetup since it allows us to host

discussions on the event page. It also helps to carry the movement

on afterwards since you’ll have people joining your meetup group

when they register for the event.

Venue and LogisticsVenues can make or break an event. A good venue will help you to

ensure that the event runs smoothly, while a bad one will cause you

to bounce around like a pinball trying to fix last minute everythings.

Co-working spaces like Chicago’s 1871 tend to make great ven-

ues. They’re designed to handle a large group of people all getting

Part Two


on the internet at the same time. They’re large enough so that

people can break out into smaller groups and still be able to hear

other. Many co-working spaces already come with their own

audio-visual equipment. And, most importantly, co-working spaces

often have staff on hand to help out.

For unconferences, large offices or colleges are also good options

since you’ll need a lot of rooms to be able to run breakouts in.

When we look for venues to run our events here’s a list of things

we look for:

• A location easy to get to, ideally near mass transit.

• A wifi network that can handle a hundred people at once. (Not

always easy)

• The venue has either a lot of places to plug in or the ability to

place more power strips out.

• A venue that has projectors and screens.

• A staff member that can be there during the event.

A venue can’t provide anything. Most of the time, this just means

food. However, this can include other random items such as:

• Dongles/Adapters (Because nobody has a laptop that will con-

nect to your projector. You need one that links to VGA, Mac to

HDMI, Mac to VGA, and so forth and so on.)

• Name Badges

• Snacks, Water, and Pop/Soda (remember to bring the healthy

stuff)

• Power strips

• Post-it notes

• White Boards / Paper Easels

• Microphones / PA system

• Projector, Screen

37

• USB Drives

• Swag (laptop stickers, t-shirts)

• Directional signage (Where’s the bathroom?)

Venues can also be one of the bigger expenses, which brings us to

our next topic.

SponsorshipsThere are a number of costs that are associated with running a

hackathon including:

• Food (We like deep dish)

• Supplies (Pens, markers, paper boards, power strips)

• Venue

• Your time (Even if you volunteer, you’re still donating your

time)

A variety of sponsors can help defray the cost of running your

event. If you’re a Code for America Brigade, you’re already getting

some support. Chicago’s Chi Hack Night actually has a rotating

list of sponsors including Smart Chicago, Thoughtworks, Code for

America, and DataMade. You can also get in-kind donations such

as the use of the venue, food, and use of software platforms and

hosted space. (Smart Chicago Collaborative is part of the Chicago

Community Trust and is funded in large part by the John D. and

Catherine S. MacArthur Foundation. We *highly* recommend

reaching out to your community foundation.)

Punch ListIf you prepared everything right, then the actual day of the event

can be easier then doing the prep work for it. Here’s our punch list

of things to do before, during and after the event.

Part Two


• Venue walkthrough (everything look ready to go?)

• Reminders to attendees?

• Security has list of names? Including yours?

• Food ordered?

• Social Media Set-Up

• Speakers slides? (Do you know how to pronounce their names?)

• If you’re speaking, did you rehearse?

• If you wanted press, did you talk to press?

• Did you do a final check-in with the other organizers?

• Sleep. (Seriously, go to bed.)

Day of:

• Signs out?

• A/V Up?

• Name tags set out?

• Chairs/Tables how you want them?

• Breakfast set up?

• People know where to go?

• Are you taking pictures?

After:

• Thank you notes

• Blog post about the event

• Follow-up to ensure work continues

Hackathons, particularly large ones, can take a lot of work.

However, when done right they can be huge spark that kicks off

civic innovation efforts in your city.

39

It should be noted that not all civic tech events have to be

hackathons in nature. They can be training camps, town halls, or

unconferences. The same lessons apply however. •

Part Two


How to run a Chi Hack Night-style event

ChiHackNight has been running in Chicago for almost three years. It

has grown from a handful of technologists a week to one of the largest

gatherings of civic technologists in the country with a diverse group of

attendees from all different fields. What distinguishes ChiHackNight

from other events is the emphasis on being a place to learn and to provide

a space work on projects. The hosts do very little project management,

and it’s primarily the attendees that drive hack night projects. Below is a

post we wrote up describing a Chi Hack Night format in summer 2014.

July 24th, 2014

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a new format at Chicago’s Chi

Hack Night in an effort to bring more leaders into the management

of hack night.

Before and AfterBefore, the hack nights had a consistent agenda.

• 6:00pm – Food

• 6:15pm – Introductions

• 6:30pm – Announcements & Presentations

• 7:00pm Hacking / Civic Hacking 101 (From 7:00pm – 7:20ish)

This worked pretty well, but it wasn’t always easy to do the connec-

tion between arriving at hack night to working on a project. This

particularly became true once our attendance became larger. Addi-

tionally, the hack night wasn’t set up in a way where people could

step up to be leaders.

41

The format has now changed in the following ways:

Leadership Council Previously, just three people organized the hack nights. Now, a

volunteer leadership committee that meets regularly runs the hack

nights and anyone can join. The general guidelines for the meeting

are based on the ones that FreeGeekChicago uses.

We want everyone to have a voice. At the same time, we don’t

want discussions to become unfocused or endless. So we try to

follow some guidelines:

• We try to keep the meeting length less than one hour.

• There is a 10-minute time limit to all topic discussions. If there

is no solution after 10 minutes, we poll the room to decide

whether to discuss the item further or table it until the next

meeting.

• The meeting notes are then posted in the ChiHackNight Google

group.

The BreakoutsThe other change is that there are now multiple breakout groups

focusing on different subject areas. This is being done as a way to

help facilitate projects and work being done in each area – even if

there’s not a particular app being worked on. The breakout groups

are divided into two groups – learning groups and working groups.

The groups are also flexible, so that if people have an interest in

starting a new one they can.

Learning Groups:

• Civic Hacking 101: An orientation into civic technology and the

event

• Code Clinic: A place where people who are learning to code can

ask questions.

Part Two


• Mob Programming: Hands-on learning! This group shares a

single screen, keyboard and mouse and use a timer to rotate

control among participants to complete a shared exercise.

• Mapping all the data we can find: Hands on workshop for

getting your data mapped and analyzed in the cloud.

• Dolphin Tank: Develop project ideas, connect to talent and

resources, or find new projects to join in a safe, friendly space

with your peers.

Working Groups: • Access to Justice

• Education

• Environment

• Pension Reform

• Social Service Delivery

• Transportation

43

How to Blog

One of the most important roles I’ve played at Smart Chicago is to serve

as an archivist to the movement. I’ve currently published more than 330

posts. Here’s a post I put together on our system as a teaching tool for

some Smart Chicago interns.

It always starts with a nice Creative Commons photoFlickr is a fantastic tool for finding pictures. We either use Flickr’s

image embed tool to copy the code directly into WordPress or we

just use Wordpress’ native tool. If we’re showcasing a specific

website or tool we’ll use a Chrome plugin called “Awesome

Screenshots” to take a picture of our screen.

WordPress is wonderful and has several features that make

blogging easy. One of these features the “More” feature. One some

Wordpress templates, posts can get long and make it hard to scroll

through all the pages. After we introduce subject of the post, we’ll

include the “More” tag to the text to create the post’s ‘fold’ so that

our home page doesn’t get too cluttered.

Once we’ve introduced the topic, we’ll talk more about the

problem we’re trying to solve.

About the problem We start off giving examples and screenshots of the issue we’re

talking about. We also want to put the problem into context. So, if

we’re dealing with something just applicable to Chicago or in the

context of a certain time-frame we want to bring that up.

Part Two


DataBecause we deal a lot with open data, we always want to point out

when data exists already. Chicago’s civic technology community

mainly gets data from three places.

• The City of Chicago data portal at data.cityofchicago.org

• The County Data Portal at datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/

• A Freedom of Information Act Request

WordPress has numbered lists and bullets that we use a lot too.

You’ll also notice that on our blog we tend to link out to different

websites. We do this because we want to show where we got our

information and because we want readers to be able to go straight

to the source.

The SolutionThe bulk of our post will be about talking about the actual solution.

If it’s an app, we’ll run down the parts of the website. However,

it’s no substitute for an actual working demo. For this we do one

of two things.

1) We use a program called Screencast-o-matic to do the demo.

Screencast records both the camera and the screen. We then

upload this into YouTube and use their embed feature to post

directly on our site.

2) If we’re covering a presentation at hack night – then we’ll use

the video we recorded there and upload that.

When we go to Hack Night – we’ve used both Google’s Hangouts

on Air feature and a program called Wirecast. When we do that,

it uploads the video directly to YouTube. We then download that

video and put it into iMovie. At that point, we’ll slice the video into

shorter parts and clean up the audio. That gets uploaded to YouTube

45

and embedded in the post. To film, we use an HD webcam and a

tripod. We also

How it came aboutMany of the solutions that come out of Chicago’s civic innovation

community have more to do with the community organizing aspect

of the work more than the technology side. We always want to stress

this and talk about how everything came together. All of the solu-

tions we talk about have to replicable – and for that it takes people

working together.

Call to Action – Getting more informationThe last thing we want to do is to give the reader a call to action.

This could mean registering for our event (like the Chicago School

of Data conference in September) or filling out a form (we use

wufoo) or clicking a link so that you can get more information.

When it’s doneWhen we’re done writing, we’ll submit it to our Executive Director

Dan O’Neil for review. We almost always have another set of eyes

look at a post because proofreading and editing are important.

When we do publish, we tend to do three things after.

1) We use a WordPress plug-in that immediately posts to our

Facebook page.

2) We’ll tweet it out being sure to mention any partners or people

we covered.

3) If it’s a topic related to one of our partners (like Code for

America) we’ll sometimes cross-post it.

Part Two


Live tweeting and using Twitter to boost your event

I use social media significantly to help spread the word at our

events as well as to share what’s happening at different civic events

throughout Chicago.

I’m going to go over a few tips and tricks for using social media

to boost your event.

You’ll usually have two goals with social media. The first is to get

people to attend your event. The second is to add followers so that

when you have future events or news you can spread it more easily.

TwitterI use Twitter when we’re covering live events. Twitter’s ability to

post rapid real time updates makes it perfect for things like this.

My strategy for events is to write up a post advertising the event.

If we know the hashtag already, we’ll start using that when we tweet

the event out.

I use the hashtag so that people can start following other ac-

counts that are also using the hashtag. This also lets our followers

know there’s an event going on and that’s the hashtag we’re using.

I’ll also retweet other accounts that are using the hashtag. Shar-

ing is caring.

Just before the event starts, I try and ensure that we’re following

all the speakers and organizers. Once the event starts, I’ll begin

livetweeting.

When I’m live tweeting, I normally have an aftermarket tool like

Hootsuite or Tweetdeck so that I can tweet from both my personal

account and my organization account. I’ll have one column set up

just for the hashtag so I can quickly retweet relevant tweets.

47

I’ll also have a phone in my hand and logged into Twitter as

my organization account. Tweets with pictures tend to get more

engagement. I normally do a photo when the event start, when a

new speaker comes on stage, or there’s a particularly interesting

quote. Whenever we take any photo or mention something some-

body said, we almost always tag the person if they’re on Twitter.

For national events like Code Across and National Day of Civic

Hacking, I’ll also use the national hashtag as well as mention the @

codeforamerica and @civichackingday account. When an account

with a large following retweets your tweet, it can significantly ampli-

fy your message.

After the event, I’ll use the twitter stream as notes for when we

blog about the event.

A note about trending and gaining followersA lot of times, particularly on television networks, you’ll see people

encouraged to ‘make something trend’ as if it’s a game you can win.

We do not advise this.

Trending doesn’t measure popularity - it measures velocity. It

tries to show what ‘new’ topic people are ‘now’ talking about. Once

a lot of people have started talking about something, it loses its sta-

tus as a trending topic. That’s also why you don’t see Justin Beiber,

One Direction, or any of the other boy bands trending all the time.

That’s also why during television shows; you’ll see the networks

make up hashtags on the fly. They know that the odds of trending

go way down over time. It’s easier to get a new hashtag trending

rather than an old one. If they tell people to tweet at a hashtag

for an upcoming episode, they lose the needed velocity to make

something trend. Once it starts trending, it’s tough to get it to stay

trending because it relies on ‘new’ people tweeting the hashtag. No

points are awarded for the same people tweeting the same thing a

bunch of times.

Part Two


Which brings us to, why try to get something to trend in the

first place?

For television shows, it’s about advertising. They want people

who are just cruising twitter to see the trend and think, “Oh wow, a

lot of people are watching this – maybe I should tune in.”

For this community, it’s not important. Your goal isn’t to trend,

but to build your audience. This is particularly true if you’re run-

ning the account for your civic tech group. You want people to start

following you and learning what you’re about and how you can get

involved. That means that buying followers won’t do you any good.

Getting Twitter followers takes time and consistently producing

content worth tuning in for.

Analytics for Twitter It used to be that you had to pay to get stats for Twitter. That isn’t

true anymore. You can access Twitter analytics for free by going to

https://analytics.twitter.com and see how you’re doing.

49

Tech Tools for Civic Organizations

One of the problems that we sometimes encounter in the tech-

nology space is that we say things like, “Oh, just use this piece of

software that I assume you know about.” Technology organizations

tend to have a “stack” of tools they work with and assume everyone

else has heard of.

It’s the digital equivalent of watching a home improvement show

and they get out a circular saw. The show says, “Oh, just make a few

cuts here.”

The problem is that it assume the viewer even has a circular saw

– and the clamps, goggles, saw horses, the working space, and the

know how to actually use the expensive piece of hardware that can

seriously hurt you if you don’t use it correctly.

Which is kind of crappy.

The good news is that there are a number of tools that are easy

to use and won’t break the bank. We tend to favor lightweight tools

because they’re easy to use, not expensive and we can use them in

solutions that are repeatable.

WordPressWordPress is the backbone of our digital communication strategy.

It’s what runs not only our website, but the website of many other

organizations as well.

WordPress is easy to set up and with a few additional changes

you can have the site point to your own domain name. There are

two options to do this. The first is that you can use wordpress.org

to set up a custom install on your server. However, we recommend

just using WordPress.com (which does all the setup on the their

Part Two


side.) Initially, you’ll have a website.wordpress.com site. You can

then pay to upgrade to have the blog point to your own homepage

site once you buy a domain name.

Once your site is set up, you can choose a template for your

website. Feel free to experiment to find one that fits your needs.

WordPress also has a number of plugins that can be used to

improve your site. For example, there’s a plugin to show tweets

from your social media accounts.

Google DriveGoogle Drive is a set of office tools where the documents live on the

web rather than your hard drive. It includes Google Docs (Word),

Sheets (Excel), Slides (Powerpoint), and a few other applications.

Having documents that live online means that you can access them

from anywhere including your phone.

However, the real reason that we use Google Drive is that it

makes it super easy to share documents and edit collaboratively.

Instead of emailing revisions of the same doc twenty different times

and having to rename the different versions, you can simply share

one link to the team. You can also post comments and have running

conversations using the embedded chat feature. During OpenGov

Chicago Meetups and Chi Hack Night, we tweet out a link to a doc

anyone can edit and take collaborative meeting notes.

Google Drive is also pretty easy to use if you’re already used to

working in Microsoft Office.

SlackSlack is an internal chat room. It’s a more modern version of IRC

with many more additional features including being able to inte-

grate with everything from Google Drive to social media channels.

Slack allows you to add different channels in addition to the

standard “General” and “Random.” When we use Slack, we have a

51

separate channel for all of our projects. Slack also has a powerful

search feature that can be useful when trying to remember some-

thing that the group was talking about from weeks ago. If your

organization ends up sending a lot of small two sentence emails,

this may help cut down on that.

Slack can just sit there in the background while you work. If you

need to get somebody’s attention, you can mention them by adding a

@ to their username (like Twitter) and it’ll send them a notification.

Slack also works well on mobile devices. While Slack has an app

for Mac and Windows, you can also just use the browser.

Slack also allows for a lot of customization. It’s still a fairly new

product, so the company is also still adding features.

MailchimpEmail is still one of the biggest ways that organizations commu-

nicate with their communities. Mailchimp helps organizations by

first helping to craft well designed eye-catching emails, but also by

helping organizations manage email campaigns. You can pick

customized lists of recipients, monitor opens/reads, and even

conduct A/B testing of different email campaigns.

WufooAt its core, Wufoo is an online webform builder. You can login and

create a form in a matter of minutes, then embed it on your blog or

just link to it. It’s a very simple way to get resident feedback, run a

contact us page, or run surveys. When people complete the survey,

you can have it send you an email to notify you. Wufoo can also

export responses in a CSV file too.

What really makes Wufoo our preferred tool is that it has an

API that we can plug into other apps. When we run the Civic User

Testing Group, we use a combination of Wufoo and Mailchimp to

manage our signups.

Part Two


TextizenTextizen is a survey tool that uses SMS messaging to get people’s

feedback. You can create a survey within a few minutes, but the

team at Textizen can help you craft a survey so that you get the best

results possible.

The way textizen works is that you set up a survey and it assigns

you a phone number. You then create signage that lists the phone

number and the first question.

It then will send text survey questions back and forth. As the

owner, you can see responses in real time and then export them to

whatever format you need.

Smart Chicago Collaborative offers the use of Textizen for free to

any civic developer in the Chicago area.

MeetupMeetup is a tool to help run meetings. We use Meetup extensively

to run OpenGov Chicago and Connect Chicago. Meetup is more

than just an RSVP system. Once somebody joins your Meetup,

they’re considered part of the group. This means that you can com-

municate with group members anytime – such as when you host

your next event.

Meetup also lets people posts messages to the group during

events so that you can keep a running conversation about what’s

going on. (We usually use it to post links to the meeting notes or

livestreams).

TwilioWe love apps that text. As an organization that cares about digital

access, we’re all too aware that not everyone has access to the Inter-

net. So, allowing our apps to text ensures that everyone can use it.

Twilio is the equivalent of giving your app a cell phone. When

you sign up for Twilio, Twilio will assign you a phone number to

53

use. You can then use the phone number to send and receive text

messages. If you’ve ever order pizza or an online delivery and got-

ten a text message right after, then you already have an idea of how

this works. Certain actions will cause your app to send out a text.

One of our favorite uses of this is the humble CTA bus tracker

app. If you go to any bus stop sign in the city, you’ll see a short code

and a number. You text the number on the sign and it tells you

when the bus is coming.

While you do need a developer to use Twilio, we wanted to in-

clude it because of the utility of texting. Twilio’s API is easy to use if

you’re a developer with some experience using APIs.

The toolset we use changes as needs and new tools come out,

but we always try to stick with tools that are easy to use and are not

overly expensive.

Part Two


Collaborative Project Management

Collaboration is at the heart of the Smart Chicago Collaborative

and is essential to achieving the goals of the civic technology

movement. The hard problems that need to be solved cannot be

solved in isolation.

There is an art to collaboration. Being in a collaboration means

that you’ve agreed that your partner or partnering organization is

already highly capable at what they do. It means that you’ve agreed

upon a common goal and a plan of action to achieve that goal.

Being in a collaboration means that you’ve opened up the lines of

communication for the duration of the project.

Working collaboratively isn’t always easy – particularly when the

project involves multiple partners or complex problems. Things

can get exponentially more complex each time you add a moving

part. Here are some thoughts on how I’ve approached collaborative

project management in my consulting practice and in my work at

Smart Chicago.

Building a planOne of the most difficult things about project management the

natural tension between sticking to a plan and the need to be able

to adjust the plan if something doesn’t go according to plan. This is

important because things never go perfectly according to plan. The

planning process is important for working on collaborative projects

because you’re going to have multiple parties running activities that

are independent of each other in order to accomplish the goals of

the project. If there’s not a well-defined plan, the project could steer

off course. Here’s our workflow for planning projects.

55

Step One: Gut Checks Define the goal, ensure the activity matches the goal, and ensure

the goal is in line with your organization’s mission statement

The first part of taking on a project is establishing the goal and

ensuring it the activity being proposed will get the results you want.

You’re essentially asking the question, “At the end of the day, what

do we want to be the result from this project?”

This is a different than saying, “We want to run a hackathon.” If

the goal is to have an app that gets resident feedback, then you don’t

need a hackathon. There are existing products that do that. If the

intended results are, “We want to engage the civic tech community

around environmental data we just released”, then a hackathon

would accomplish this. It’s perfectly OK to have one idea about how

to get something done and then change tactics once you review it.

Once you determine that the goal will achieve the objective you can

move on.

The other thing that you will need to check for is that the project

goals are in line with your organization’s mission. Would getting

these results also help your organization achieve its mission? Is

your organization’s mission to help with FOIA requests? Does

taking the time to write, print, and distribute a newsletter help

you achieve this? Is your organization in the business of creating

technology tools to help store data? Does running a event help with

this? If the answer to the question is no, then it may be advisable to

say no to a project. It isn’t always easy to say no, but performing this

‘gut check’ before you begin is a good way to ensure the resources

of your organization are being spent wisely.

Once you perform these ‘gut checks’ and everything checks out,

you’ll be ready to begin constructing the plan.

Part Two


Step Two: Work backwards from the goal and make a list of everything you’ll needThink about the activity that you’re setting out to do. For example,

you want to host a hackathon helping an environmental agency

engage with the developer community about new environmental

data. What does that look like?

At the end of the event, you’d have people presenting on proto-

type projects to all event participants after a day exploring the data

sets. (Needs: Venue, microphones, projectors)

You would then work backwards through the day and mark down

items that come up. For example, before the presentations the hack-

athon would have teams working with the data and coming up with

prototypes. (Needs: Wifi, power strips, things to write down brain-

storming notes on, lunch, breakfast.) They’d also need an orienta-

tion into the data and the problem set. (Speakers for the morning,

links to different data sets)

You would continue to work backwards until you get to your

current point in time. For our hackathon example, this means going

over getting people to come to the event. (Needs: RSVP page, blog

posts, invites, social media outreach).

Working backwards helps ensure that you don’t forget anything

in the planning process. At the end of the exercise, you’d have a list

of items that you would need to have ready as well as a draft of a

possible timeline.

Step Three: Take inventory of resources and identify gapsThe next thing you want to do is to ensure you have the right re-

sources to achieve the goal of the project. This often means taking

stock of the resources all the organizations have at their disposal and

matching them with the needs of the project. This is often the very

57

reason to work on projects collaboratively. It allows two organiza-

tions with different strengths and resources to combine them into

achieving a goal. There might be times when you check the list of

needs and resources and discover that you’re lacking in an area. At

that point, you have the option of hiring a vendor or reaching out to

an organization with resources you’re looking for and partnering up.

For our hackathon example, I have lots of experience running

hackathons. However, Smart Chicago doesn’t have any subject

matter expertise working on environmental issues. This would be a

gap to fill.

As you work through matching needs with available resources,

you’ll also notice a list of items that nobody can really provide –

but can be easily purchased or ordered through a vendor. (For our

hackathon example, this is food and flip charts.) This help with our

next step.

Step Four: Determining a budget and harmonizing the plan with the budgetOnce you determine the project needs and what resources you have

on hand, it becomes easier to establish a budget. Depending on

your project, you can price out some things pretty easily. (For our

hackathon example, it’s a simple process to start calling up different

catering companies and getting estimates for food.)

If your project involves hiring a developer, designer, consultant

or other freelance position, then additional steps may be involved.

You may need to put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) that include

the deliverables you need and how soon you need it. We’ll get into

the details of writing good RFPs in a later chapter. For right now,

understand that it may take some time for vendors to put together

responses to an RFP depending on what you’re requesting.

Part Two


A final thing you should account for when making a budget

is taking into account the cost of your own time. Even if you’re

volunteering, you should account for the hours you spend working

on the project.

As the costs of the project begin to shape up, you’ll get a sense

of if your organization has the resources to pull off the project or

if the organization needs to obtain outside funding through grants

or sponsorship. Alternatively, your organization may have been

awarded a grant to fund a project – and you have to ensure that

your project plans fits into the budget.

Step Five: Writing out Scope of Works and Memo of Understanding (MOU)At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what you want

to do, what it’s going to cost, who is doing what, and a general

timeframe. Now it’s time to get those thoughts down on paper. The

most common ways to do this for collaborative projects are Scopes

of Works and Memos of Understanding (MOUs).

Scope of Work

A Scope of Work is a document that’s written in the planning stages

of a project. They’re often written in the context of one person or

organization hiring another. If there’s more than one partner that’ll

be doing the work, there’ll be more than one scope of work. Scopes

of Work lay out what work is to be done, how quickly it’s to be done,

what report backs need to be done in connection with the work and

(in the case of a vendor/client relationship) what the estimated

compensation will be. Good scopes of work are flexible enough

to allow the person or group doing the work to best decide how it

gets done, but strict enough to say what the result will be. (Good

example, I need a website that helps people find public computing

locations. Bad Example: I want a website written in Python that

59

let’s people find public computing locations by searching a Google

Fusion table.)

Scopes of work can either be written by the client or the vendor

as a response to an request from a client. It doesn’t matter so much

who starts the process, but rather that both parties agree on the

final scope of work. Even if both parties have a pretty good under-

standing of what needs to be done, going through the process helps

to make sure everything is crystal clear. It also helps set limits on

the work to be done in case the project turns out to be much more

complex than first realized.

Once the scope of work is finalized, they can often be turned into

contracts that organizations can use to pay vendors or consultants.

Memo of Understanding

A Memo of Understanding (MOU) is similar to a scope of work on

that it sets up what work is to be done, who is doing it, the expected

timeframe, and what report backs are needed. The main difference

between a Scope of Work and a Memo of Understanding is that a

MOU Is used between two parties when no money is being ex-

changed.

The MOU is important because it sets up exactly who is doing

what at the very beginning. If there’s ever a disagreement on who is

supposed to be doing what, both parties can refer to the MOU.

MOUs and Scopes of Work are essential to collaboration because

they establish a clear understanding of the project. Once these are

signed and agreed upon – or turned into contracts if needed – you

can then start on the project.

Step Six: Iterative Process: Checking in on progress and making adjustmentsOne of the drawbacks to technology projects is that they take a lot

of time and effort to create. Given the costs of hiring developers,

Part Two


technology projects can also get expensive very quickly if projects

are not managed correctly. Additionally, if project managers wait

until something has been delivered it and it comes out wrong, it can

take a significant amount of time to correct.

An iterative process favors a short cycles of work, check-in, and

adjustments. During the check-ins, the expectation is not to have

made progress in leaps and bounds – but rather to have made

smaller updates. Because the progress is in small increments, it’s

much easier to make adjustments than it after a team has spent

several weeks working on a product.

It also means that you can catch blockers early so that they can

be resolved quickly. Does the team need more resources? An extra

team member to get it done? Is one of the vendors not up to the

task and need replacing?

There will be some cases when the blocker is large enough that

the time and effort it would take to resolve it outweighs the cost of

doing something else entirely. For example, your team is working

on an app to analyze a dataset that was received from a Freedom

of Information Act Request. It turns out that the data is far more

dirty than first anticipated with missing data, misspelled entries,

and obvious typographical errors. The amount of time that would

be needed to clean it up far exceeds the timeline first established.

The question that you would face as a project manager is do you

continue the course and accept a longer timeline? Do you narrow

the scope of the project and drop the data that is the most difficult

to clean up? Or do you add additional resources to help with clean-

ing up the data? There’s no specific right answer, but these are the

kinds of challenges that may pop up as managing collaborative

projects. (For reference, when Smart Chicago was faced with a

similar problem we narrowed the scope.)

In addition to discovering blockers early on, working iteratively

also allows for testing of products in front of real users. When the

team has something that’s somewhat close to the final product,

61

they can have the project undergo user testing to ensure it’s going

to work for the user like it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t, then rather

being a failed project, the team runs through another iterative cycle

and makes improvements before launching.

Check-ins with partnersYou should also schedule regular check-ins with partner organi-

zations. This lets everyone know where everyone is at, what the

current blockers are, and if there’s any adjustments that need to be

made to the plan. By keeping everyone well informed, it also helps

work more collaboratively. Surprises are great for birthday parties,

but not when managing collaborative projects.

Step Seven: Once it’s doneOnce you’ve completed the activity that you had planned out before,

it’s time to let people know about what you did. Whether it’s a new

app launch, successful hackathon event, or a new guide on how to

run civic technology projects – you should tell people about what

you did. You can do this through blog posts, social media, or email

campaigns.

It’s important to tell people about the project so that people can

learn from your actions. The more people learn about your actions,

the more it advances the field.

Part Two


Health and Human Services Primer

In 2015 for National Day of Civic Hacking, I wrote up a number of

primers on different civic issues to help people get a better under-

standing of the issues as they start working on projects.

Healthcare and the social services that are often connected to it

is an extremely complicated and expensive issue. According to the

Kaiser Foundation, the United States spent about $2 trillion dollars

on health care.

In addition to regular healthcare, state and local governments

spend a tremendous amount of funds on social services. The effects

of the recession, pension crises in multiple states, and cuts from

Congress have caused state and local governments to make drastic

cuts to social services. This happened at exactly the time that more

people required social services putting significant strain on the

social safety net.

Aside from the big picture, the experience of those receiving

social service is an innately human one – and an experience that

most Americans don’t have. Most Americans at some point have to

go to the DMV and the experience is often portrayed as downright

in pop culture as downright terrible. The experience of being on

social services often is worse – not in just the big picture sense, but

in small ways. The social safety net is managed by a multitude of

government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Technology projects, such as mRelief, center on health and

human services often try and help residents better navigate and

understand the resources available to them.

63

Data Resources

Data .gov/health

The federal data portal contains over 800 datasets on health. We’ve

highlighted some key ones:

• Hospital Charge Data: Data are being released that show signifi-

cant variation across the country and within communities in

what providers charge for common services. These data include

information comparing the charges for the 100 most common

inpatient services and 30 common outpatient services.

Providers determine what they will charge for items and

services provided to patients and these charges are the amount

the provider’s bills for an item or service.

• Community Health Status Indicators (CHSI): to combat obe-

sity, heart disease, and cancer are major components of the

Community Health Data Initiative.

• CDC Cancer Statistics: The United States Cancer Statistics

(USCS) online databases in WONDER provide cancer incidence

and mortality data for the United States for the years since

1999, by year, state and metropolitan areas (MSA), age group,

race, ethnicity, gender, childhood cancer classifications and

cancer site.

County Government Data

Many county governments administer their own health and human

service systems – some of which release this data to the public.

Cook County, IL (https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov)

• Burial Locations: The following page lists the final disposition

sites of the indigents buried by the Cook County Medical

Examiner’s Office.

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• Health & Hospitals System – Outpatient Registrations, by

Facility, Zip Code, Month – Fiscal Year 2011: Enclosed data

represents outpatient registrations including hospital ancillary

services

San Francisco, CA [City and County] (data.sf.gov)

• Child Care Subsidies, San Francisco, CA: Data illustrate the

total number of state and non-state child care subsidies

available as well as the number of children (0-12 years old) that

are eligible for subsidies and the difference between these two

numbers by zip code in San Francisco.

• HSA 90 Day Emergency Housing Waitlist: Provides the senior-

ity list for entry into HSA 90 day emergency shelter waitlist.

The list will be generated on 2/24/14 and updated twice daily.

State Government Data

States administer Medicare, Medicaid and often provide funding for

local health and human service programs. Below is a highlight of

some state data sets.

Illinois (data.illinois.gov)

• Affordable Care Act (ACA) Enrollment Summary Data:

Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollment data by age, race, gender,

and county. (PDF)

• Reportable Communicable Disease Cases, 2010 – 2012: Data

provided by the Communicable Disease Section of the Office of

Health Protection’s Division of Infectious Diseases

New York (data.ny.gov)

• Assisted Outpatient Treatment) Court Orders: This dataset

contains the number recipients with AOT petitions and court

65

orders and their length of time on court order, by county, region

and statewide.

• Genealogical Research Death Index Beginning 1957: The

Genealogical Research Death Index assists individuals with

locating New York State (NYS) death records that fall within

defined genealogy years, exclusive of New York City recorded

death records

City Government Data

Cities are also releasing data on health and social services. Here’s

some highlights from different cities.

Chicago (data.cityofchicago.org)

• Food Inspections: This information is derived from inspections

of restaurants and other food establishments in Chicago from

January 1, 2010 to the present.

• Neighborhood Health Clinics (Historical): Former neighbor-

hood health clinic locations, hours of operation and contact

information. These clinics were closed or transferred to private

management in July 2012

• Infant Death Mortality in Chicago: This dataset contains the

annual number of infant deaths annually, cumulative number

of infant deaths, and average annual infant mortality rate

with corresponding 95% confidence intervals, by Chicago

community area, for the years 2005 – 2009

Boston (https://data.cityofboston.gov)

• Asbestos Removal Permits: Boston Public Health Commission

Asbestos permitting removal of asbestos.

Part Two


New York City (https://nycopendata.socrata.com)

• New York City Leading Causes of Death: The leading causes of

death by sex and ethnicity in New York City in since 2007

• New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) Pa-

tient Satisfaction Survey: Patient satisfaction at HHC hospitals

is measured by a standardized survey known as the Hospital

Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems

(HCAHPS). The survey has been validated by the federal

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a stan-

dard assessment tool for all hospitals throughout the nation.

• Most Popular Baby Names by Sex and Mother’s Ethnic Group,

New York City: The most popular baby names by sex and moth-

er’s ethnicity in New York City.

• Potential Partners

The best civic apps are built through partnerships between tech-

nologists, residents, and the people who work on the front lines.

Here’s a list of potential partners you can work with in your own

cities to help build projects that can make an impact.

Health Data Consortium: The Health Data Consortium is a pub-

lic-private partnership working to foster the availability and innova-

tive use of open health data to improve health and healthcare. This

organization is particularly useful for government agencies looking

for help opening up health data.

Code for America Health Focus Team: The health focus area

works to improve the health of people and their communities. Code

for America works with the wide variety of teams that contribute to

these outcomes—including city health departments, public health

agencies, state offices, and non-profit organizations.

Smart Chicago Collaborative: Smart Chicago’s multiple health

initiatives provide equipment, training, and information that allow

residents to take action to improve their own health. We are strong

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advocates for promoting open data practices in the healthcare field.

Smart Chicago is always happy to talk and share our work.

Local Health Departments: Local health departments are in

the trenches on a daily basis working to make their communities

healthier and can make great partners. The Chicago Department of

Public Health was one of the first city agencies to jump into civic

hacking with the Chicago Flu Shot app.

Examples of Health Related Projects

mRelief

mRelief is a site that simplifies the social service qualifying process

with an easy-to-use form that can be accessed online and through

SMS. Residents can check to see if they’re eligible for a variety of

programs including food stamps, medicaid, WIC, and more.

EBT Near Me

EBTNearMe is the easiest way to find stores and surcharge-free

ATMs where you can use your EBT card in California. It was build

by the Code for America Health Team because California welfare

recipients pay nearly $20 million per year in ATM surcharge fees

partially because there isn’t an easy way to find the free ones.

It’s an open source project built with public retailer data from the

USDA and ATM data graciously shared by the CA Office of Systems

Integration.

Foodborne Chicago

Foodborne Chicago uses computers & code to search Twitter for

tweets related to food poisoning in Chicago. The system does as

much as it can to automatically zero-in on the tweets Foodborne

thinks are really about a possible food poisoning case and really

coming from Chicago. Then real humans from the Chicago

Part Two


Department of Public Health review the tweets and @reply back to

people with a link back to this page where Foodborne asks for addi-

tional information. When they fill out the online form, it becomes a

311 service request to inspect the suspect restaurant.

Chicago Health Atlas

The Chicago Health Atlas a place where you can view citywide

information about health trends and take action near you to im-

prove your own health. The site displays large amounts of data from

sources like the City of Chicago, State of Illinois, and local hospitals

so you can get big-picture views of health statistics in Chicago like

hospital admissions, uninsurance rates, cause of death, birth rates.

and drill down deep into neighborhoods to see specific information

and how it compares to the city overall.

People to follow on Twitter• @lippytalk: Jake Solomon is a member of Code for America’s

health focus team and spent time on SNAP benefits so he could

better understand the challenges that users face.

• @reedmonseur: Raed Mansour works on #publichealth tech

innovations for @ChiPublicHealth like @FoodBorneChi, BU

#HealthComm Faculty, APHA Member, @PurdueAlumni & @

BUalumni.

• @PublicHealth: Official account of the American Public Health

Association: For science. For action. For health.

• @CDCgov: CDC’s official Twitter source for daily credible

health & safety updates for Centers for Disease Control &

Prevention

69

Safety and Justice Primer

Safety and Justice is a relatively new broad term that used to de-

scribe the subject areas of criminal justice, public safety and reform

efforts. The term is also used to try to bridge the tension between

the need to keep our communities safe while ensuring that the

mechanisms used to do that are equitable and fair.

While the topic may be broad, there are some very specific

challenges that are on the forefront.

Overcrowding at Jails When people get charged with a crime, they are sent to jail. If they

can secure a bond (a payment made to the court to secure their ap-

pearance at trial), then they are released on bail. If they cannot, then

they are placed in jail to await their trial at a cost to the government

that’s often greater than the amount of their bond. (By contrast,

Prisons are where people are sent after they have been convicted of

a crime – they are not the same thing.)

According to the Vera Institute for Justice, even as crime has

gone down the population of jails has increased nationally as eco-

nomically disadvantaged people fill the prisons because they are

unable to make bail. According to the study, 75% of people currently

in jail awaiting trial are there for nonviolent crimes like property,

traffic, or drug crimes. The overcrowding of prisons largely impacts

people in low income neighborhoods and communities of color. Per

the NAACP, African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times

the rate of whites.

The other element is that some jails have become dumping

grounds for the mentally ill.

Tom Dart is the sheriff of Cook County, where he oversees what

he calls the largest mental health facility in the State of Illinois. In

Part Two


45 states, the largest mental health provider is a prison or a jail.

There are a number of things that governments like Cook County

are trying to do to address the issue including electronic monitoring

and alternative sentencing (often where the inmate is diverted to

a treatment facility instead of incarceration.) However, impending

budget cuts may stem progress.

This trend of more people in the system is also occurring at the

same time overall crime is trending down nationally.

Juvenile Justice Another big challenge that people in this area tend to focus on is

juvenile justice. Convictions for criminal convictions tend to skew

young – particularly in economically depressed areas. The problem

is often exacerbated by cuts in school funding and youth programs

designed to keep youth away from gangs. In addition, the victims of

gun violence are also disproportionately young and male.

Once a person turns 18, there are ways to have a juvenile record

expunged. This doesn’t just mean the case is removed from a crim-

inal record – expungement means that in the eyes of the law the

incident never existed. So, for example, if a person is asked on a job

application if they’ve ever been arrested for a crime they can legally

answer “No” if that incident was expunged.

However, in many states this isn’t automatic. The resident has

to go through a legal process that can be complicated. Even if the

resident wasn’t found guilty or had their case dismissed, they may

still have a criminal record which can prevent them from getting a

job, joining the military, or getting into college.

Even when an expungement is successful and in the eyes of the

law didn’t happen, the Internet has a long memory. In some cases,

news stories about an arrest still exist and come up first in Goo-

gle searches even if the person wasn’t convicted. In worst cases,

nefarious businesses make money by scraping mugshot pictures

71

from government websites then charging people to remove them.

Google has recently changed the search algorithm to push mugshot

sites down the results list and the FBI has asked victims of these

schemes to file a complaint.

A complex system Tackling problems in the criminal justice system can seem daunt-

ing simply because of the complexity of the system. The criminal

justice systems is made up of many government entities at the

local, state, and federal level that each handle a different aspect of

the system. From a data perspective, each agency has it’s own data

system and very little of it is handed off from one part to the other.

(So, you couldn’t take one incident report number and trace it all

the way through to somebody being sentenced to prison.)

Data SourcesWe’ve highlighted some data sets that pertain to the area of safety

and justice below. However, because the criminal justice system is

complex it may be of use to check out Crime and Punishment in

Chicago to get a better sense of the different aspects of data avail-

able. You can also check out the Sunlight Foundation’s excellent

coverage on the topic – including a Google Doc that showcases a list

of known data resources nationwide.

• National Crime Victimization Survey (US Department of

Justice): This research helps the justice department measure

how many people are victims of certain kinds of crimes, or the

victimization rates.

• Dallas Police Department Call of Service: This data release

stands out because it identifies the units responding to each

event, a link to map that will display the block from where the

call originated, and the status of the call, among other included

data fields. However, the data can’t be downloaded.

Part Two


• Chicago Crimes 2001 – Present: This dataset reflects reported

incidents of crime (with the exception of murders where data

exists for each victim) that occurred in the City of Chicago from

2001 to present, minus the most recent seven days.

• Henrico County (VA) Arrest Reports: Arrest data is searchable,

but not downloadable in bulk.

• Cuyahoga County Office of the Prosecutor (Ohio): Includes a

performance dashboard that includes dispositions statistics,

juvenile dispositions, cold case rapes, heroin deaths and prose-

cutions, incarceration statistics, and charging statistics.

• King County (WA) Adult Bookings: The Jail Bookings Open

Data dataset is provided by the King County Department of

Adult and Juvenile Detention. The dataset contains adult jail

bookings which have occurred within the last twelve months;

specific dates are indicated on the web site.

• Maryland State Courts: Website lists what occurs in every court

hearing while also detailing information regarding the officer

that arrested the defendant, the prosecutor(s) prosecuting the

case, and the judge presiding over the case. (No bulk download)

• Oregon Prison Population: Dates and the count of inmates in

the State of Oregon’s prison system for the date. Based on a

DOC report for 1980 -1993. Based on query of DOC data for

1994-current

Potential PartnersLegal Aid: Legal aid foundations and societies offer free legal ser-

vices to clients that may not be able to afford these services on their

own. Many of the apps that focus on expungement, have legal aid

foundations as partners.

Code for America Safety and Justice Focus Team: Code for

America partners with local governments to build and grow digital

73

safety and justice services focused on increasing public safety and

reducing costs, helping governments transform themselves along

the way.

Neighborhood Organizations: Neighborhood organizations play

a vital role in building relationships between residents, public offi-

cials, and other non-profit organizations.

Examples of Safety and Justice Related ProjectsExpunge.io: Expunge.io is a website designed for people with

juvenile records in Illinois to kick of the process of expunging, or

erasing, those records. It is a youth-led project run by Smart Chica-

go and controlled by the Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council.

Jail Population Management Dashboard: Jail Population Manage-

ment Dashboard helps judges and other stakeholders understand

the conditions in the metro jail and use this data to visualize how

their decisions affect program, facility and inmate outcomes.

Convicted in Cook: Convicted in Cook is a project that analyzes

five years worth of conviction data received through the Office of

the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County by the Chicago

Justice Project.

Courtbot: Courtbot is a simple web service for handling court

case data. It offers a basic HTTP endpoint for integration with web-

sites, and a set of advanced twilio workflows to handle text-based

lookup. It’s been deployed by Atlanta to help people pay their traffic

tickets online instead of waiting in line at traffic court.

People to follow on Twitter:• @TomDart: Sheriff of Cook County. Bringing an innovative ap-

proach to law enforcement in the second most populous county

in the US.

• @MarshalProj: The Marshall Project is a nonprofit, nonpar-

tisan newsroom covering America’s criminal justice system.

Tweets usually from @amandablair.

Part Two


• @PublicSafety: The Coalition for Public Safety is working to

reform our criminal justice system to make it more just, more

fair, and more effective.

75

Transportation Primer

Transportation policy impacts many different aspects of city life.

Transportation policy impacts economic development, the environ-

ment, and overall quality of life. Transportation is also something

that cities, states, and the federal government spend a lot of money

on. In 2009, total transportation expenditure by State and local

governments reached the record level of $270 billion. Despite these

expenditures, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the

country’s infrastructure a grade of D+. Specifically, the ASCE is

calling for additional investments to repair roads, bridges, and rail

infrastructure.

Data Resources:The US Department of Transportation has over 1600 transportation

related data sets at data.gov along with several developer resources.

These developer resources include:

• Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) Open Source Data

API

• Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) SaferBus

API

• Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Safety Data APIs

• Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) APIs

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) API

• At the local level, Chicago also has several sets of data related to

transportation including:

• Average Daily Traffic Counts

• Daily Boarding Totals for the Chicago Transit Authority

• Historical Congestion Estimates by Region API

Part Two


• The State of Illinois’ Department of Transportation also

publishes data on transportation including:

• Average Annual Daily Traffic 2010

• IDOT Rest Areas Map

Potential Partners The best civic apps are built through partnerships between tech-

nologists, residents, and the people who work on the front lines.

Here’s a list of potential partners you can work with in your own

cities to help build projects that can make an impact.

• City Transportation and Transit Agencies: Chicago Department

of Transportation, New York’s MTA, or Boston’s MTBA.

• Regional Planning Authorities: Regional planning authorities

are responsible for helping to plan major transportation proj-

ects across wide regions. This is often a requirement for these

projects to receive federal transportation dollars. Because of

that, these agencies often have data useful for transportation

projects or experts who can help with projects. Some examples

of these agencies are the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Coun-

cil, Association of Bay Area Governments, and the Miami Valley

Regional Planning Commission.

• Cycling Groups: Cycling groups try and advocate for policy

reforms to promote cycling in cities. These groups may

be familiar with current city policies, popular bike routes,

and trouble areas. These groups include Critical Mass, San

Francisco Bicycle Coalition, and Bike Austin.

• Bikeshare Systems: Many cities are now installing bike share

systems to increase cycling in their cities. Many of these bike

share systems regularly release data about ridership and usage

that can be used to power apps.

77

Examples of Transportation Related Apps: • SpotHero: SpotHero is a civic startup that efficiently connects

parking demand and parking supply. SpotHero allows parking

spot owners to earn income by renting their spot when it’s

unoccupied. SpotHero was the winner of the Apps for Metro

Chicago Challenge in 2012. Since then, they’ve graduated from

TechStars/Excelerate , raised 2.5 million in VC funding, expand-

ed to seven cities and has hired twenty people.

• Chicago Bike Crash Map: Crash data for Chicago in 2005-2012

where a bicyclist or pedestrian was the first point of impact by a

driver’s automobile, as collected by responding law enforcement

and maintained by the Illinois Department of Transportation.

• TextMyBus: Built by Code for America for the Detroit Depart-

ment of Transportation. This app lets riders text a number to

see when the next bus is.

Other resources on the webStreetsblog: Streetsblog is a national network of blogs that cover

transportation issues on a daily basis.

People to follow on Twitter• @SteveVance – Transportation reporter for Streetsblog Chicago

and one of the co-organizers of the Transportation of OpenGov

Night Night.

• @Gabe_Klien – Former transportation chief for DC and

Chicago.

• @Anthony_Foxx – Current US Secretary of Transportation

• @JoesphKopser – CEO and Founder of Ridescout, a transit app

that aggregates data from multiple transit agencies

Part Two


Part Three Wins

Here’s a series of blog posts I wrote to talk

about “wins” in Chicago civic tech. The dates

of these posts will vary, but you’ll notice a

pattern. Our civic tech wins are marked by a

collaborative effort that focuses on people.

79

Smart Chicago and the City Tech Plan

The City of Chicago is a founding partner of the Smart Chicago

Collaborative and they have a number of responsibilities in the Chicago

Tech Plan. Here’s an update I posted regarding the city’s most recent

technology plan.

June 25th, 2015

At Techweek, City of Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna

Berman announced an 18-month update to Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Chicago’s first Tech Plan was first launched in 2013 and laid out

a strategy to establish Chicago as a national and global center of

technological innovation.

Since it’s launch, Chicago’s civic technology community has

made significant progress towards the goals of the tech plan.

As a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago

through technology, Smart Chicago is proud to be heavily involved

in the implementation of Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Here are some highlights from the update.

Next Generation InfrastructureChicago is working with internal and external partners to improve

the speed, availability, and affordability of broadband across the city.

The City is preparing to create a Request for Proposal for compa-

nies to design, construct, implement, and manage a gigabit-speed

broadband network.

In addition to broadband infrastructure, the city is also work-

ing to digitally connect its infrastructure. Part of this includes the

launch of The Array of Things project, which will place network

Part Three


of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago collecting

real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity

for research and public use. (You can listen to their presentation at

Chi Hack Night here.) You can already get up to the hour updates

on beach conditions thanks to sensors maintained by the Chicago

Park District. The Department of Innovation and Technology has

loaded the information onto their data portal.

Make Every Community a Smart CommunityOne of the major efforts of the civic technology community in

Chicago is closing the digital divide in every neighborhood.

Much of the work in the coming months will focus on Connect

Chicago. This citywide effort, led by Smart Chicago in partnership

with LISC Chicago, Chicago Public Library, World Business Chica-

go, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Tech-

nology aligns citywide efforts to make Chicago the most skilled,

most connected, most dynamic digital city in America.

Here’s more from the Tech Plan about the program:

As part of this initiative, program partners are creating a profile of a

fully connected digital community that can be used as a benchmark and

will provide best-practice toolkits and other resources to help all Chicago

communities reach this benchmark.

Another big part of the City’s strategy to close the digital divide

in Chicago involves the Chicago Public Library. Libraries around the

city already function as public computing centers and now they pro-

vide Internet to Go – a program where residents can check out lap-

tops and 4G modems so that they can access the internet at home.

The City of Chicago and the civic tech community is also heavily

focused not only access, but on digital skills. The Chicago Public

Library’s Cybernavigator Program will be expanded and Chicago

Public School is working on implementing computer science cur-

riculum at all schools.

81

On our end, Smart Chicago is working with Get In Chicago to

run a youth-led tech program this summer. The conceptual model

for this program is “youth-led tech”, which means teaching tech-

nology in the context of the needs & priorities of young people.

Youth will learn how to use free and inexpensive Web tools to make

websites and use social media to build skills, generate revenue, and

get jobs in the growing technology industry. They will also learn

about all sorts of other jobs in tech— strategy, project management,

design, and so on.

Effective GovernmentThe City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is

also making great progress in using data to help city government be

more efficient and effective. One of their first projects, WindyGrid,

is a geospatial Web application designed by the City’s Department

of Innovation and Technology that strategically consolidates Chica-

go’s big data into one easily accessible location. WindyGrid presents

a unified view of City operations—past and present—across a map

of Chicago, giving City personnel access to the city’s spatial data,

historically and in real time, to better coordinate resources and

respond to incidents.

The City of Chicago will be open sourcing the project later this

year on their Github page.

That’s not the only open source project that the city has on the

books. Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr. recently spoke at Chi

Hack Night to talk about their new system to predict the riskiest

restaurants in order to prioritize food inspections. The system

has found a way to find critical food safety violations seven days

faster. Aside from the important aspect of less people getting sick

from foodborne illness in the City of Chicago, there is another very

important aspect of this work that has national impact. The entire

project is open source and reproducible from end to end.

Part Three


Since the release of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago has been

working with the Chicago Department of Public Health on the

Foodborne Chicago project. Foodborne listens to Twitter for tweets

about food poisoning and converts them into city service requests.

The Tech Plan update has some results from the project.

A study of the system, published by the Centers for Disease Control,

found that during March 2013 – January 2014, FoodBorne Chicago

identified 2,241 “food poisoning” tweets originating from Chicago and

neighboring suburbs. The complaints identified 179 Chicago restaurant

locations; at 133 (74.3%) locations, CDPH inspectors conducted unan-

nounced health inspections. A total of 21 (15.8%) of the 133 restaurants

reported through FoodBorne Chicago failed inspection and were closed;

an additional 33 restaurants (24.8%) passed with conditions, indicating

that serious or critical violations were identified and corrected during

inspection or within a specified timeframe.

Chicago’s open data portal is also getting expanded as part of the

updated Tech Plan having grown by more than 200 data sets over

the last two years. Chicago was the first City to accept edits to select

data sets through the City’s GitHub account.

Open311 is also getting an upgrade with the city undergoing a

procurement process to build a new 311 system. As part of the pro-

cess for upgrading 311, the new system will go through user testing

through the Civic User Testing Group.

Civic InnovationA big part of the city’s strategy around civic innovation is support-

ing the work of civic technologists here in Chicago. As part of the

Tech Plan, Smart Chicago will continue to provide resources to civic

technologists like developer resources, user testing, and financial

support to civic technology projects.

The Tech Plan also calls out our work with the Chicago School

of Data. The two day experience was wholly based on the feedback

83

we received from dozens of surveys, months of interviews, and a

huge amount of research into the work being done with data in the

service of people. If you missed the conference, here are some of

the key takeaways.

The Civic User Testing Group also plays a part in the Tech Plan

and has recently been expanded to include all of Cook County.

Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman stated that

Chicago has the strongest civic innovation community in the coun-

try. A large part of that community has been the Chi Hack Night,

now in it’s fourth year with attendance now reaching over 100

people regularly.

Technology Sector GrowthOne of the thorniest issues for civic technologist is the issue of

government procurement. One of the things that the city has been

doing is meeting with different groups to talk about ways the city

can make it easier to buy products and services from smaller busi-

ness and startups.

As part of the Tech Plan, the City of Chicago is taking this on

directly. Here’s the quote from the Tech Plan:

This summer, DoIT will release a Request for Qualifications for

start-up and small-sized companies to join a new pool of pre-qual-

ified vendors eligible for future City procurement opportunities.

Companies who are deemed qualified will be placed into a pool and

receive access to City contract opportunities in the areas of software

application development and data analytics.

To further decrease the barriers facing smaller-sized companies

in competing for City business, the City has modernized its insur-

ance requirements to allow for pooled insurance plans. Start-ups

that are members of an incubator, such as 1871, or smaller compa-

nies that come together for a group insurance plan, may now meet

the City’s insurance requirements as a group. Insurance require-

Part Three


ments were identified as a barrier to conducting business with the

City in a series of listening sessions conducted over the past year

with these companies.

This is a huge opportunity not only for civic tech companies, but

it will enable the city to take advantage of the innovation coming

out of these companies.

85

Side effect of civic tech partnerships may be healthier

communities

August 7th, 2013

One of the success stories in Chicago’s civic innovation community

is the rapid spread of health related apps that have come out of both

the volunteer civic technology community and paid development

efforts. This started last year with Tom Kompare’s Chicago flu shot

app that helped Chicago residents find free flu shots near them.

(Later on, this flu shot app spread to Boston and Philadelphia.)

Professionally, Kompare is a web developer with the University

of Chicago. In his spare time, he’s one of the most active civic tech-

nologists in Chicago.

Kompare’s flu shot app was just the start of the Chicago Depart-

ment of Public Health partnering up with civic technologists on

a number of projects including Foodborne Chicago, the Chicago

Health Atlas, and Tom Kompare’s newest app Back to School.

Back to School is an app built for parents to make sure that their

child has the immunizations they need to go back to school. CDPH

hosts several immunization events for school children throughout

the city and the apps helps parents find events near them. This will

be also good trial run for the larger immunization effort that CDPH

will run this fall.

Not only do these two apps use the same data format, this data

format is now a proposed national standard. Shortly after the rede-

ployment of the flu shot app in Philadelphia earlier this year, Phila-

delphia Chief Data Officer Mark Headd began an effort to develop a

national standard for flu shot data. This effort included input from

Part Three


both government officials and civic technologists from Chicago, San

Francisco, Austin, Oakland, and other cities. By helping to set up

one standard, both of these open source apps are deployable in any

city that elects to conform to the standard.

This is not the first app that the Chicago Department of Public

Health has partnered with. CDPH also partnered with the Smart

Chicago Collaborative to run the Foodborne Chicago app. The app,

which was made possible through a variety of efforts, listens to

Twitter for reports of food poisoning and then prompts the author

to a web page that reports food poisoning to 311. Once it’s reported

the 311, the city can then dispatch a health inspector to that location.

The Chicago Health Atlas, an app that shows health trends and

local resources in Chicago, was another app that resulted from

community partnerships. Initially, the Atlas was built on an exist-

ing partnership by informatics researchers at five major academic

health centers in Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, Stroger

Hospital, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and

Rush University. Since that time, the Chicago Health Atlas has been

expanded to include data and researchers from the Chicago Depart-

ment of Public Health. The site itself was built by Chicago civic app

firm Datamade and also uses data from civic startup Purple Binder.

And it’s not just formal partnerships that are producing health

related apps. As part of a summer internship program, Chicago

Spanish newspaper Vive Lo Hoy hired its first web developer Wil-

berto Morales. Morales worked with food inspection data provided

by the City of Chicago to built eatsafe.co.

Eatsafe.co helps residents find out how the restaurants near

them fared during their last food inspection. This open source app

includes information on how food inspections in Chicago work.

(Unlike some other cities, Chicago’s system is pass-fail and not by

letter grade.) This is Hoy’s first app and they plan to continue build-

ing more apps to help address community issues.

87

Morales learned to code, not from a formal computer science

program, but by being a part of FreeGeek Chicago’s Supreme Chi-

Town Coding Crew. FreeGeek Chicago, a Humboldt Park non-profit

organization, helps the community by recycling and repairing old

electronics. FreeGeek trains volunteers on computer repair tech-

niques and offers the opportunity for residents to earn a refur-

bished computer through their Earn-A-Box Program. In March,

FreeGeek’ Chicago’s members decided to launch a program to teach

residents how to develop web applications. It’s certainly been a big

success, as evidenced by the Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew win-

ning the Chicago Migrahack with their app Finding Care.

So why is Chicago producing so many high quality health apps

so quickly?

Lesson 1: Open data is fuelData is fuel. None of these applications would be possible without

the City of Chicago developing an open data policy and executing

on it. Chicago has more data sets than any other city. Their deep

involvement with the civic technology community allows the city’s

data team to meet the needs of civic innovators creating apps that

serve the community.

Lesson 2: Partnerships are extremely importantThe Chicago Chi Hack nights attract some of the city’s best geeks to

work at the intersection of technology and civic problems. However,

if the hack nights and other civic innovation efforts only attract web

developers, designers, and data gurus we end up missing a vital

piece of the puzzle: the neighbor that we’re trying to help.

By partnering with city departments, non-profit organizations,

and community organizers – the community is able to develop apps

centered on the civic problem in a way that helps the people who

are working in the trenches. Both volunteer efforts like

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OpenGov Chicago and the Smart Chicago Collaborative are con-

tinuing to do outreach with civic organizations to help foster part-

nerships between technologists and community activists.

Lesson 3: Grow your own talentThe civic innovation community is growing – but not nearly fast

enough. To meet the challenges brought on by the Great Recession,

we need more people with technology skills necessary to grow the

civic technology space. Efforts by FreeGeek Chicago and the Engle-

wood Codes project by Teamwork Englewood are helping to create

more technologists in the city’s neighborhoods.

Lesson 4: Solve real problemsLastly, it’s important that the civic innovation community solve real

problems that matter to real people. Part of the side effect of having

strong partnerships in both government and the neighborhoods is

the learning what is happening on the front lines of civic work. The

Back to School app came about as a result of Tom overhearing a

conversation about CDPH’s back to school campaign while working

on the update for the flu shot app. Having civic technologists listen-

ing to not only tech issues, but issues like education results in web

app like schoolcuts.org being created.

Building civic apps is more than just the code – the real secret to

success is community.

89

Englewood Codes

August 29th, 2013

Tonight, 25 teens from Englewood Codes will demonstrate their

websites at Kennedy King College. Englewood Codes is a 10 week

summer program run by Demond Drummer of Teamwork

Englewood. The program teaches kids not just web development,

but teamwork and leadership.

Teamwork Englewood was first formed in 2003 as part of the

New Communities Program sponsored by LISC – Chicago and

the MacArthur Foundation. They’ve done work in the Englewood

neighborhood to help increase the digital adoption rate. This in-

cludes helping to run the Englewood Portal and helping to connect

local residents to technology.

This included an effort in 2011 to teach 15 teens how to code over

the course of six weeks.

The effort generated a lot of buzz and youth in the neighborhood

started asking about the program again in 2012. In 2013, an effort

was launched on Kickstarter to run the program again – this time

for ten weeks and using Raspberry Pi’s.

Getting the project launched:The project had a great amount of support throughout the city

and the community including the Department of Innovation and

Technology, After School Matters, LISC-Chicago and the City

Colleges of Chicago which donated space for the program.

World Business Chicago had recently started a curated Kickstart-

er page to highlight projects that involved community development

called Seed Chicago. The project was featured on the page and

began to buzz on social media. They reached their fundraising goal

with plenty of time to spare.

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But Teamwork Englewood didn’t stop there – they created a

stretch goal to expand the number of students to 30 – and received

the funding to it. In total, the project had 167 backers. (Including

$1,000 from Smart Chicago as Demo Day host.)

What Englewood Codes AccomplishedDuring the 10 week course, the students learned HTML, CSS,

Bootstrap and working with GitHub. However, the program didn’t

just teach code the program also taught teamwork and leadership.

Listen below as Demond describes how they formed the students

into teams and encouraged the group to work together to solve

problems.

The programs also made great use of the GitHub platform. Be-

cause GitHub can be used using just brower tools, it didn’t require

Englewood Codes to install anything on the computers. Students

created different branches of their work, forked other student’s

codes, and used the gist feature to post notes and staff used it to

post lesson plans.

Lessons LearnedDemond also shared some lessons learned from running

the program.

• Small is beautiful: Small class sizes allowed for more one on

one interaction.

• Go deep VS going broad: Going more in-depth on topics and

not rushing the course.

• Debug bad learning habits: There’s always something to do and

learn, you can go ahead of the teachers, you can learn from your

peers!

• Teamwork makes the dream work!

• Make it real: Connect what we’re learning to the real world.

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• Live in the cloud: GitHub was amazing because Demond could

see every student’s code.

• Dedicated space is ideal

What’s next for Englewood CodesEnglewood Codes will continue as a fall after school program.

Englewood Codes will also help jumpstart a middle school comput-

er club. The program will also connect students with professional

mentors.

Englewood Codes will also take on a greater advocacy role. In

order for Chicago to grow their own talent, Chicago will need to

maintain computer science teachers in neighborhood schools.

Englewood Codes will also push for a federal mandate for computer

science classes in schools.

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City of Chicago launches OpenETL Toolkit

The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is

responsible for handling all of the city’s data. In addition to producing

a vast about of open data on their data portal (data.cityofchicago.org),

they also are harnessing the power of their own data to build a predictive

analytics platform. As part of this effort, the city has released a number of

their tools on their GitHub account (github.com/Chicago) including the

OpenETL toolkit. This was one of the most popular posts I ever wrote for

Smart Chicago.

September 24th, 2014

The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology re-

leased the OpenData ETL Utility Kit at the Code for America Sum-

mit this morning. The ETL Utility Toolkit will give cities the same

tools Chicago uses to get data from their own internal systems and

unto their data portals.

We’ll explain why this is such a big deal and what ETL is below!

What’s an ETL?ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. It’s shorthand for a

system that takes data from one system and puts it someplace else.

Like fancy plumbing for data.

So, say that the city tows your car. At some point, the city enters

your vehicle’s information into a city system. On the DoIT’s end,

they use an ETL system to take the data from that system, trans-

forms it into a format that they can then put here – on the city’s

data portal. Once it’s on the data portal, civic technologists can work

with it.

93

To do this, the City of Chicago has deployed a number of ETL

tools. They’ve now open sourced those tools as part of a toolkit that

any city will be able to adopt for free.

FeaturesHere’s how the team describes the app on GitHub:

ETL Utilities for an Open Data Program

This toolkit provides several utilities and framework to help govern-

ments deploy automated ETLs using the open-source Pentaho data

integration (Kettle) software.

Namely, this toolkit will assist with:

• Load data from a database an load it to a Socrata data portal

• Steps to integrate with an email server to provide e-mail alerts

on the outcome of ETL scripts

• Handles deployment issues when using multiple operating

systems during development

• Utilities to allow administrators to quickly analyze the log files

of ETLs for quick diagnostics

• The ETL framework is organized so each function can be mod-

ified in one file that is used by all ETLs. This provides for easier

maintenance, upgrading, and modification over hundreds of

ETLs.

Features

• Open source at the core – this framework can be deployed

using Kettle, an open-source ETL software. Pentaho also

provides telephone support and training if desired.

• Compatible with multiple data sources – this ETL framework

can be used with a variety of data sources, including a range of

databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and variety

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of NoSQL), APIs, text files, etc.

• Compatible workflow for multiple operating systems – ETLs

can be developed and deployed across multiple operating

systems. ETLs can be developed on a Windows environment

and deployed on Linux

• Helpful utilities – includes several scripts to help users quickly

analyze log files

95

Four Days After Divvy bike share launch an

app prototype and an API presented at hack night

July 8th, 2013

Just four days after the launch of the Divvy Bike Sharing program,

Chicago’s civic technology community had already put together a

prototype app and an API using bike share data.

Chicago Chi Hack Night played host to representatives from both

Alta Bicycles (The company that manages Divvy) and the Chicago

Department of Transportation to talk about the new bike share

program and the data that’s available.

The first data set, available at (http://divvybikes.com/stations/

json), gives information on real-time usage statistics and availability

of bikes per station.

This data set reflects the same format from other bike share

systems across the globe. This enabled Chicago’s data to be merged

into other bike apps such as Oliver O’Brian’s Global Bike Share

Map.

Locally, Ian Dees and Steve Vance have been hard at work

building applications with this new data set. They have put together

google document that contains a list of resources for the civic inno-

vation community who are interested in working with bike share

data. Dees has built an API that makes it easier to access the bike

data. Vance has already taken advantage of this API to provide bike

share information in his Chicago Bike Guide. (As a reminder, this

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was presented to Chi Hack Night just FOUR DAYS after the launch

of Divvy.)

Steve Vance and Ian Dees discuss apps that are built using bike

share data

Daniel Gohlke from Alta bikes answered questions about the in

and outs of the data as well as plans to release information on the

most active routes and where people are biking. Gohlke’s stated that

in most cities this data is released quarterly, but if CDOT wants to

release this data at an increased frequency that it should be possi-

ble.

Question and answer session with representatives from Divvy

and CDOT

Given that Divvy was only launched for a little over 2 weeks ago,

we’re excited about what’s to come in terms of potential uses for

this data. John Tolva, Chief Technology Officer for Chicago, would

like to see data from different transportation systems integrated

into a single app:

“The speed with which our civic innovation community seized

on Divvy data gives me great hope that a truly multi-model, hyper-

local journey planning service — across cabs, public transit, shared

bikes — can be assembled fairly easily. Most of the data is there. All

that’s needed is an intelligent stitching-together.”

For those interested in working on bike share data, you’re invited

to attend the next Chi Hack Night – every Tuesday at 6:00pm inside

Merchandise Mart.

97

Largelots, a working app for Chicago neighborhoods

April 29th, 2014

On the Chi Hack Night on April 15th, Demond Drummer presented

at OpenGov Hack Night about the Large Lots Program. This city

program is designed to allow residents to purchase vacant lots in

their neighborhoods for just a single dollar in an effort to help

revitalize the neighborhood.

The Large Lot program allows the city to transfer the vacant lots

in the Green Healthy Neighborhood Program area to nonprofits or

residents that own property in the same block as the vacant proper-

ty. Previously, the program was set up so that you had to be on an

adjacent lot. To help increase the number of lots transferred, the

city and community groups began working together to update the

program.

The program was designed community feedback in mind.

Teamwork Englewood and Resident Association of Greater Engle-

wood (R.A.G.E.) spearheaded the community outreach around the

program which launched required a tremendous amount of com-

munity organizing and planning.

Once the policy had been updated, Teamwork Englewood

reached out to Chicago civic tech company DataMade to build the

site. Fueled by freshly released Cook County parcel data and exten-

sive knowledge of how to apply to purchase a lot, the site provides

all the information needed for residents to purchase large lots.

A user enters in their address to see a map of all available lots

near them. If the user is interested, the site will provide detailed

instructions on how to purchase the lot with links to the relevant

sites. (Future iterations of the app would allow users to fill out the

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applications all from inside the application.) Once the pilot is

complete, the site then will show all of the lots that were purchased

under the program.

PressThe Largelots program was featured in a number of press

publications including:

• WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift

• The WBEZ Public Data Blog

• DNAinfo

• Chicago Sun-Times

• Curbed Chicago

Results of Largelots .org This round of the Large Lots program was a pilot. In the short time

the application period was open the City received over 400 applica-

tions to purchase lots. The site itself received over 6,300 pageviews.

More importantly, a great many number of vacant lots will now

be purchased and used by people in the neighborhoods. Vacant

and abandoned buildings remain a thorny problem for the city and

initiatives like this are a great step towards solving them.

Additionally, apps like these show that there is a marketplace for

civic technology working in tandem with city governments and the

non-profit sector.

99

mRelief – Mobilizing social service relief in Chicago

November 11th, 2014

Last week marked the launch of mRelief, a site that simplifies the

social service qualifying process with an easy-to-use form that can

be accessed online and through SMS. Residents can check to see

if they’re eligible for a variety of programs including food stamps,

Medicaid, WIC, and more. Here’s the press release by mRelief

creators on day of launch.

mRelief is made by an all-woman team hailing from different

backgrounds and walks of life dedicated to making an impact

with technology. Smart Chicago has supported mRelief under our

CivicWorks Project funded by the John S. and James L. Knight

Foundation.

mReliefmRelief is already deployed at the Martin Luther King Jr Commu-

nity Services Center. The City of Chicago’s Department of Family

and Support Services run the Community Service Centers. DFSS

Community Service Centers help individuals and families in need

access a wide range of resources from shelter, food and clothing to

domestic violence assistance, job training/placement and services

for the formerly incarcerated. Staff members are using mRelief

to help streamline the process of evaluating their eligibility.

The mRelief team has also partnered with Purple Binder to refer

residents to other useful local resources if they are ineligible for

public assistance.

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How mRelief WorksmRelief works by having users fill out a quick form to see if the

user is eligible. If the users eligible, they’re then connected to that

office. If the user isn’t eligible, the system will try to find alternative

programs using Purple Binder.

mRelief will continue to work with Smart Chicago post launch to

conduct user testing and enable SMS messaging for the site so that

those without access to a computer can take advantage of the site.

(This was done soon after the post was written and now users in Chicago

can access the mRelief site through just SMS.)

About the teammRelief is an all-woman startup out of Chicago launched this past

summer. The founding team members are Rose Afriyie, Genevieve

Nielsen, and Marina Goldshteyn.

The team is alumni of the Starter League a successful cod-

ing school in Chicago. Project Manager Rose Afriyie is a former

Googler and White House intern and holds an MPP from the Uni-

versity of Michigan. Chief Technology Officer Genevieve Nielsen

was 2014 valedictorian of Davidson College and graduated with an

economics degree. She has successfully launched freefoodfinder.co.

Lead designer Marina Goldshteyn, was the lead designer on health-

care website https://www.humana.com/ and also designed http://

jerrygarcia.com.

You can find out more about mRelief at mRelief.com.

101

The Chicago Area Red Cross shows us the power of open source

On Tuesday November 18th, Jim McGowan with the Red Cross of

Greater Chicago gave a presentation at Chi Hack Night about their

open source project: DCSops.

The Chicago Red Cross uses DCSops to manage their situational

awareness information and dispatch volunteers to an incident. This

is a huge change from January when they were using carbon paper

to record information about incidents.

Jim McGowan first encountered Chicago’s civic hacking commu-

nity after attending the first National Day of Civic Hacking event in

2013. The system they were currently using to manage Volunteer

Connection was cumbersome and the organization would have to

do information management by spreadsheet. McGowan then start-

ed attending Chi Hack Night and began to be inspired by all the

work being done.

McGowan began working with a developer in San Diego to create

DCSops. This was done as the local chapter of the Red Cross and

not the ‘big’ national organization – primarily because it was easier

to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. The bet paid off,

with DCSops now expanding to multiple chapters across the

country. What’s more, the app is designed, coded and deployed

using volunteers.

The app is responsively designed so that it can be used in the

field on smart phones and tablets. This is important because in or-

der to receive cash assistance the Red Cross has to have a signature.

With the app, people can simply sign with their finger instead of the

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carbon paper. The app also saves information on the tablet or

smartphone so that if there’s no internet connection it can be

uploaded later.

In practice, when an incident occurs the Red Cross dispatcher

can create an incident within seconds. Once that occurs, the app

pulls from Volunteer Connection to get all of the volunteers that

are on duty. The dispatcher can select who they want to recruit and

send a text message to all potential volunteers. Volunteers can text

back that they’ve accepted the assignment and then check in once

they arrive. This information is then fed back into the DSCops sys-

tem. Additionally, since Twilio now has MMS messaging volunteers

can take pictures of an incident and send that back to headquarters.

The Chicago Red Cross is now looking at ways to help grow and

sustain the app. This also includes an idea to create a Red Cross

Labs so that the Red Cross can hire full time staff to help with

tech projects.

103

Aldertrack: Your Guide to the 2015 Chicago Elections

February 4th, 2015

At the February 3, 2015 Chi Hack Night, Jimm Dispensa talked

about Aldertrack – A project to help residents of Chicago follow the

2015 Chicago Aldermanic and Mayoral elections. The site offers

race forms, analysis, webinars, as well as providing extensive social

media coverage of each race.

History of AldertrackThe site was first started by Dispensa in 2007 as a text only website

that tried to gather details about Chicago’s elections and sort them

out by ward.

In 2010 Mike Fourcher became a part of Aldertrack and the

group partnered with the (now defunct) Chicago News Cooperative

to create the first version of Early & Often for the 2011 Chicago

elections. (This may sound familiar since the Sun-Times’ had it’s

own Early & Often site that was purchased from the Chicago News

Cooperative.)

For this year’s elections, Ramsin Canon has also joined the team

and is helping to make the site a more complete guide to this year’s

elections.

Using tools to make the site cheap to runThe Aldertrack team uses several tools to make the site inexpensive

to run. Here are the ones the teams lists as indispensable:

WordPress: WordPress is a popular blogging platform that’s sim-

ple to use. (We use WordPress as well!)

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Mailchimp: Mailchimp is a platform that allows users to send

out email campaigns. Aldertrack uses it to send out daily email

updates about the election.

Slack: Slack is an internal communication tool that organizations

use to communicate with each other in real time. It’s similar to

the old IRC chat rooms, but it’s got a much better user interface

and can integrate with other platforms like GitHub.

Stripe: Stripe is a payment system that integrates easily with apps.

If you’ve ever used Lyft, you’ve used Stripe

Join.Me: Join.me is a screen sharing tool that the Aldertrack

teams uses for Webinars.

data.cityofchicago.org: The Aldertrack team also makes extensive

use of the City Data Portal

The Aldertrack Team also has several tools that they don’t love,

but use anyway including

• Microsoft Word and Excel

• Adobe Acrobat for PDF reading

• The Chicago Board of Elections Website: The team uses the site

to get information, but says it’s not the most user friendly site.

There were also sites that the team called useless such as Facebook

and printing their own newsletters. Dispensa said that while people

will print things out themselves, it’s not cost effective to print for

a medium-sized run of things. The team at Aldertrack also finds

Facebook useless for small audiences.

Lessons LearnedDispensa shared several lessons that he’s learned in running the

Aldertrack. The first few lessons revolve around knowing their audi-

ence. Dispensa says the audience for Chicago politics isn’t as big as

you think and that their more interested in raw data than analysis.

105

Dispensa also says it takes a lot of effort and inside knowledge of

local politics to produce quality content for political junkies.

The team also found that traditional advertising doesn’t do much

for increasing engagement among political junkies. They also

found that exposure on other media hasn’t driven up readership or

sales either.

The Aldertrack team found that while video doesn’t get many

eyeballs – it does make the organization seem more professionals.

For their webinars, the team uses two iPhones and a lapel mic.

Dispensa also says that more open government data has leads to

more, not less, information arbitrage opportunities.

Part Three


The City of Chicago unveils predictive analytics model to find critical food safety

violations faster

May 26th, 2015

City of Chicago Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr spoke at last

week’s Chi Hack Night to talk about their new system to predict the

riskiest restaurants in order to prioritize food inspections – and has

found a way to find critical violations seven days faster.

The problem with the way that most cities conduct food inspec-

tions is that by law they have to inspect all of them. However, the

number of restaurants far outweigh the number of inspectors. In

Chicago, there’s one inspector for every 470 restaurants. Since they

have to inspect them all, the normal way of doing this is random in-

spections. However, the team knew that the residents wouldn’t get

foodborne illness at random restaurants – they would get sick from

those few restaurants that don’t follow all the rules.

The Department of Innovation and Technology partnered with

the Chicago Department of Public Health and staff from Allstate In-

surance to see if they could use analytics predict which restaurants

would have critical violations. (Side note: It’s a brilliant move on the

part of the City and the Allstate to contribute volunteer hours using

something that actuaries specialize in.) Some of the data sets used

to make these determinations were:

• Establishments that had previous critical or serious violations

• Three-day average high temperature (Not on the portal)

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• Risk level of establishment as determined by CDPH

• Location of establishment

• Nearby garbage and sanitation complaints

• The type of facility being inspected

• Nearby burglaries

• Whether the establishment has a tobacco license or has an

incidental alcohol consumption license

• Length of time since last inspection

• The length of time the establishment has been operating

All of the data, with the exception of the weather and the names of

the individual health inspector, come directly from the city’s data

portal. (Which builds on the city’s extensive work in opening up

all this data in the first place.) When factoring all of these items to-

gether, the research team was able to provide a likelihood of critical

violations for each establishment, which was developed to prioritize

which ones should be inspected first.

In order to test the system, they conducted a double-blind study

over a sixty day period to ensure the model was correct.

The system has gotten rave reviews and coverage from a number

of publications and entities including Harvard University, Govern-

ing Magazine, and WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift.

Aside from the important aspect of less people getting sick

from foodborne illness in the City of Chicago, there is another very

important aspect of this work that has national impact. The entire

project is open source and reproducible from end to end. We’re not

just talking about the code being thrown on GitHub. (Although, it

is on the city’s GitHub account.) The methodology used to make the

calculations is also open source, well documented, and provides a

training data set so that other data scientists can try to replicate the

results. No other city has released their analytic models before this

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release. The Department of Innovation and Technology is openly

inviting other data scientists to fork their model and attempt to

improve upon it.

The City of Chicago accepts pull requests as long as you agree to

their contributor license agreement.

Having the project be open source and reproducible from end to

end also means that this projects is deployable to other cities that

also have their data at the ready. (Which, for cities that aren’t, the

City’s also made their OpenETL toolkit available as well.)

The Department of Innovation and Technology has a history of

opening up their work and each piece they’ve released (from their

data dictionary to scripts that download Socrata datasets into R data

frames) builds on the other.

In time, we may not only see Chicago using data science to im-

prove their cities – but other cities building off the Chicago model

to do so as well.

109

Does your building not recycle? Report it here!

February 5th, 2015

The Environmental Breakout Group at Chi Hack Night has been

working on a site to report buildings that don’t recycle. Chicago’s

ordinances require buildings with five or more rental units to

provide recycling. However, the city doesn’t always enforce this law

leading some landlords to not provide recycling.

Claire Micklin, Ben Wilhelm, and Alex Kahn put together to help

residents report buildings that don’t recycle.

The team will be using the data to visualize reports of buildings

that don’t recycle and provide a hub for residents seeking more

comprehensive recycling services. Already, the site has received

900 reports on 750 locations in the first week that it launched.

(The site was getting hit so much that it was running into Google’s

API limits – and so they started using Smart Chicago’s Google API

account.)

Micklin first started the project after seeing so many of her

neighbors blue bins filled up constantly because neighboring build-

ings weren’t providing recycling.

Micklin says she found working with the Environment Breakout

to be really helpful for finding resources and coming up with ideas

on how to do it. Scott Beslow, who helps lead the breakout group,

helped put the bones together in terms of constructing the site and

getting developers interested. The team used the OpenCity Apps

Github repository to collaborate on the app.

The site was announced at last week’s Chi Hack Night to rave

reviews and has appeared on WBEZ, the Mike Nowack Show, and

DNAinfo.

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The group hopes to use the information to lobby for stronger

enforcement of the recycling ordinance. The team will continue to

work on the app during Chi Hack Night that happens every Tuesday

at 6:00pm at the offices of Braintree.

111

Part Four Lessons Learned

The next few chapters go over some lessons

learned from running different projects for the

Smart Chicago Collaborative.


Lessons Learned from the CivicWorks Project

The CivicWorks is a program funded by the Knight Foundation and

the Chicago Community Trust to spur support for civic innovation

in Chicago. The program goals are to produce 200 content pieces, 5

apps that solve government problems, and 5 apps that solve com-

munity problems.

The project had five top-level goals:

• Work with government entities to make more public data

available

• Create an online publication providing news and analysis on

open government

• Help government agencies to use their own data to improve

public services

• Engage non-profit organizations on efforts to find community

solutions that are based on public data and data collected by

their own organizations

• Identify technology solutions benefiting government perfor-

mance and community solutions that can be sustained by the

private markets

Descriptions of Project and their Results

Illinois OpenTech Challenge

The Illinois Open Technology Challenge to bring governments,

developers, and communities together in a common mission to use

public data and create digital tools that will serve today’s civic needs

and promote economic development. Smart Chicago worked with

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government officials to publish 138 new datasets (34 in Champaign,

15 in Rockford, 12 in Belleville, and 77 from the 42 municipalities

South Suburban Mayors & Managers Association). Smart Chicago

also worked with developers in meetups all over the state-—in 6

locations in 4 cities with 149 people. Smart Chicago also preformed

outreach in each of our communities to reach regular residents

with needs that can be addressed through data and technology.

SWOP/LocalData

With LocalData, the Southwest Organizing Project’s process of

inventorying vacant buildings is faster, collaborative, and more

complete. When we first engaged with SWOP, there were conduct-

ing the surveys of the area on paper and transcripting the informa-

tion into Microsoft Excel - then used Microsoft Trip Planner to draw

up the maps. Now,the survey is done right from the a smartphone

and the data is uploaded into a central site. This data, which is more

accurate than the city’s current dataset of abandoned buildings,

is proving to be valuable to efforts such as the Cook County Land

Bank project — and to other organizations across Chicago.

Affordable Healthcare Act Outreach App

The Affordable Care Act Outreach App is a text-based tool we creat-

ed to make it easier for Navigators from our partner LISC-Chicago

to help residents sign up for the Affordable Healthcare Act through

the healthcare.gov site. During the enrollment period, LISC’s

Health Care Navigators have collectively enrolled 2,975 Chicagoans.

Thanks to the Wufoo platform, LISC Chicago was able to track how

their navigators did. During these outreach events or one-on-one

appointments, navigators have made meaningful contact with near-

ly 27,000 residents.

Part Four


Textizen

Textizen is an SMS based survey tool that civic organizations can

use to get resident feedback. Organizations can create a survey

campaign and then place the survey options on posters, postcards,

or on screens during live events. Organizations can then receive

real time feedback as people text in their answers.

We used Textizen to aid the campaigns of Chicago Defender

Charities, CDOT, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the

Metropolitan Planning Council. Two of these organizations, CDOT

and Metroplanners, ended up purchasing their own Textizen plans.

The CDOT campaign was the largest Spanish language response in

the Textizen’s history and the Chicago Defender Charities had the

largest ever response to a poll.

WBEZ Public Data Blog

The WBEZ Public Data Blog is dedicated to examining and pro-

moting civic data in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois. WBEZ is

partnering with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to provide news

and analysis on open government by producing content items that

explain and tell stories hidden in public data.

In total, the WBEZ Public Data Blog created 124 blog posts. More

importantly than the blog, was that this relationship ended up put-

ting Chicago civic technologists on WBEZ’s afternoon shift. There

are over thirty stories on WBEZ’s tech shift featuring civic technolo-

gy - many of them being civic hackers who build projects on at hack

night. This allowed people who normally don’t get on the radio to

talk about their work.

While Afternoon Shift was shut down by WBEZ, we do note that

the Public Data Blog is continuing forward.

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Chicago Works for You

Chicago Works For You is a citywide dashboard with ward-by-ward

views of service delivery in Chicago. The project is our most robust

use of the City’s Open311 system.

Foodborne Chicago

Foodborne Chicago is a website that connects people who complain

about food poisoning on Twitter to the people who can help them

out— the Chicago Department of Public Health. Last year, Food-

borne Chicago classified over 2,600 tweets related to food poison-

ing in Chicago, which led to 233 food poisoning reports submitted

to CDPH. From those reports an additional 150 restaurants and

foodservice inspections occurred.

The app was also a precursor to the city’s new system for using

predictive analytics to identify new cases of critical food violations

seven days in advance.

Crime and Punishment in Chicago

The Crime and Punishment in Chicago project provides an index of

data sources regarding the criminal justice system in Chicago. We

aggregated sources of data, how this data is generated, how to get it,

and what data is unavailable. This project is a key way we are using

the Civic Works grant to use data journalism to uncover the value of

data and cover the stories behind the data.

The project also supported the work of FreeGeek Chicago and the

Chicago Justice Project.

The site also helped to inspire the Sunlight Foundation’s Crim-

inal Justice Project that uses Crime and Punishment as a model to

catalogue criminal justice data from all over the nation.

Part Four


LocalWiki

LocalWiki is a hyperlocal wikipedia designed to let anyone edit and

update information about their city. LocalWiki Chicago is a part of

our CivicWorks project, funded by the Chicago Community Trust

and the Knight Foundation. Smart Chicago paid for the seeing of

content in LocalWiki combined with the Chicago Public Library.

Convicted in Cook

As a follow-up to the Crime and Punishment in Chicago project,

Smart Chicago partnered again with the Chicago Justice Project

and FreeGeek Chicago to clean up and analyzes five years worth of

conviction data received through the Office of the Chief Judge of the

Circuit Court of Cook County by the Chicago Justice Project.

The project also help to support the work of the Chicago Justice

Project, whose data ended up fueling follow up work like Chicago’s

Million Dollar Blocks.

Promptly .io / A Safe Haven

As part of the CivicWorks Project, we’ve helped launch a partner-

ship between Promptly.io and A Safe Haven to provide the Prompt-

ly text-based followup services to A Safe Haven clients. One of the

challenges that face A Safe Haven is following up with their clients

after they’ve left the program. Clients often move and it’s not always

easy to maintain contact people once they’ve left. If A Safe Haven

was aware that somebody needs additional services - such as career

counseling - then they can offer it if It’s also more difficult to track

progress over the long term.

Through the CivicWorks Project, we’re provided A Safe Haven

a license for Prompt.ly. A Safe Haven will use the software to text

follow-up messages to their clients to see how they’re doing. This

will enable A Safe Haven to both track the progress of their former

clients as well as reach back out to residents who may need further

assistance.

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mRelief

mRelief is an app that helps Chicagoans determine their eligibility

for government benefits.

Smart Chicago provide $15,000 through our CivicWorks Proj-

ect, which is funded by the Knight Foundation. We also host their

text-messaging platform on our Twilio account under our Developer

Resources program. We also conducted a CUTGroup test on the

product in early 2015.

mRelief has grown tremendously and has added services, lo-

cations, and the ability to text to their app. Additionally, they have

launched a screening app for early childhood learning programs -

linking up with our work on the Early Childhood Learning Portal.

Lessons Learned One of the lessons learned is that civic technologists can provide

value not just through arming partners with technology tools, but

with knowledge about digital tools.

A large part of our engagement with our partners was simply

teaching them that these tools exist and how to leverage them.

There are still digital skills gaps in civic organizations and through

this project we’ve been able to advise high capacity organizations

like SWOP and LISC-Chicago on technology issues. Between the

events we host and the programs we run, we are a great teaching

organization.

Lightweight tools that we can deploy repeatedly are an effective way to

get impactful results quickly.

Out of all the CivicWorks projects, our use of Textizen showed

that we could help make impacts at organizations quickly and with-

out an enormous amount of lift on Smart Chicago’s part. Having

the ‘super’ contract with Textizen saved us time on contracting and

it helped that we had previous work to show potential partners.

It also allowed us to show organizations what was possible with

Part Four


simple lightweight tools. SMS messaging isn’t the most fancy of

technology tools, but it’s something that we’ve shown can be very

impactful.

Product Management is difficult, but do-able

Both projects with FreeGeek Chicago and the Chicago Justice

Project contained a lot of product management lift. Product Man-

agement, as opposed to project management, is a different skill that

required wrestling with a bit of a learning curve. While both prod-

ucts launched and were successful, future civic tech projects should

keep in mind the extra time cost. It also helped expose the lack of

training in product management skills in the space as a whole.

Products and Projects that perform a function are more impactful

than products and projects that tell a story.

The most impactful CivicWorks project will most likely be

Smart Chicago’s investment in mRelief. mRelief helps to address a

problem experienced on the front lines of social service delivery in

the city. Our least impactful project was LocalWiki, which while still

active, didn’t take off to the extent we first hoped.

Sustainability should play a role in future programs.

One of the noticeable effects of the program was that we had

many first year partners ask us again for help funding the second

year of programming. A few partners indicated that without further

funding they would not be able to continue using the service. In

contrast, when we partnered with organizations with Textizen we

were very up front about this being a one shot deal and it may have

helped result in those organizations positioning funds to purchase

outside contracts.

mRelief understood instinctively that Smart Chicago couldn’t

underwrite the program forever and quickly moved to apply for oth-

er grants - which they received from a number of sources. mRelief

continues to find funding sources to increase their sustainability.

119

The CivicWorks Project works best as a “force multiplier’ for

community focused/high capacity organizations working in the

trenches to tackle our biggest civic issues.

Smart Chicago has become adept at quickly understanding a

technology need and being able to identify potential solutions - and

we often have the resources to fund that solution. This has enabled

us to provide tools and resources to number of high capacity organi-

zations both inside and outside of the CivicWorks project.

One of our values that Smart Chicago and programs like

CivicWorks bring to the Chicago Community Trust and other

funders is that we augment the work being done by other civic

organizations. When speaking with other civic tech organizations

about getting funding, one of the things that’s quickly pointed

out is the idea of collective impact. Our work in helping grantees

already being funded by Knight enhances the power of those grants.

Part Four


Civic Tech events as learning opportunities, Hack Night and National Day of

Civic Hacking

Over the past four years, I’ve both run and have been involved in a

lot of civic technology events. While not all of them have been the

same, the most successful events certainly have a common theme:

They’re learning events.

Civic technologists have to be a little bit of a polymath having

to know about two distinct fields. It doesn’t help that both of these

fields love their jargon and work in ways that don’t seem obvious to

outsiders.

However, the whole polymath thing only goes so far. Civic

technology crosses so many different subjects – health, web devel-

opment, social services, UX design, transportation, DevOps, safety

and justice – that people have to spend years learning about it so

they can do their jobs effectively. It is incredibly difficult to be an

expert on both ends. It requires deep collaboration – build with, not

for and the like – to build something that’s solves a real problem

effectively.

A large part about what makes weekly hack nights so valuable

is the chance to learn these skills and the act of putting people in

rooms that wouldn’t normally interact. What happens when you get

a social worker and a UX designer together? Or data scientists and

somebody from legal aid? Or a community organizer and an app

developer? The civic people get more tech savvy and the tech people

become more civic savvy by learning from one another. That’s a

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positive outcome in-and-of-itself, but also empower people to be

able to work on a civic technology project when the opportunities

arrive.

The way that events are run can also help set the tone for learn-

ing. By putting resources online before the event, event organizers

can get through a lot of the frequently asked questions. When event

organizers call at jargon, it helps set up the expectation that every-

one shouldn’t assume that people are familiar with all the inside

terminology. People are at these events to learn.

This goes double for national events like Code Across and Na-

tional Day of Civic Hacking. These events attract a lot of first time

participants to civic technology events. One of the big lessons I’ve

learned is that how-to guides and simple glossaries are very popular

pieces of content. (The glossary that I wrote for this year’s National

Day of Civic hacking can be found at the end of the book.)

A large part of the strategy around documenting the Chi Hack

Night has been to write down the lessons learned so that other

people can learn from them. It’s not enough to simply know what

projects were built or worked on – people need to understand the

thought process behind the solution that was built.

As civic technologists continue their work in this field, they must

document their efforts in order to raise the overall knowledge of the

space. The more civic technologists share, the more likely that we’ll

avoid repeating work and avoid making the same errors.

Part Four


Appendix

Appendix A: An Incomplete List of Chicago Civic Technology GroupsAs part of our work, the Smart Chicago Collaborative makes a lot of

introductions. Chicago has a deep bench of civic innovation talent

with multiple organizations working in tandem to use the power

of technology to help solve problems. There are also a number of

mailing lists and meetup groups that are in the civic innovation

space. To help get people who are interested in the space more

acquainted, we’ve put together a list of mailing lists, events, and

resources for people who want to get more involved.

Mailing ListsThese mailing lists will help connect you to a broad network of civic

innovators.

Code for America Brigade

This is the easiest way to get plugged into the national civic technol-

ogy community. Once you join this google group, you’ll start getting

emails from the CfA brigade community and can send out emails

to the larger group. This group gets a LOT of traffic, and is a good

way to see what’s going on.

FreeGeekChicago:

FreeGeek Chicago is a not-for-profit community organization that

recycles used computers and parts to provide functional computers,

education, internet access and job skills training to those who want

them.

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OpenGovChicagoland:

This Google Group contains hundreds of Chicagoland residents

who have an interest in greater government transparency and civic

innovation.

Chi Hack Night:

Subscribe to updates on upcoming Chi Hack Night speakers and

events.

Meetups:These meetings are open to the public and a great way to get

involved in Chicago’s civic technology community.

OpenGovChicago-land

This Meetup is for citizens who are interested in seeing their

federal, state, and local government function more efficiently and

responsively. We are inspired by people who are actively building

tools and experimenting with solutions along these lines, like the

Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightlabs.com/), and GovTrack

(http://GovTrack.us). We believe that open source software practices

and internet culture provide good examples of how people can work

cooperatively on complex problems to produce meaningful results,

but you don’t have to be a techie to be part of this meetup. Whether

you are an activist or a government employee, or just a hacker

looking for interesting projects, come to the Open Government

Chicago group to meet other interested people and get involved in

making things happen.

Chi Hack Night:

Come join a group of passionate folks working at the intersection of

open government, cities, and technology. This is an evening of civic

tech hacking, learning, and hanging.

Appendix


Chicago City Data User Group

You don’t have to be a developer to use Chicago’s rich sets of data!

The Chicago City Data users group is for end users, business users,

enthusiasts, students, entrepreneurs, anyone interested in how to

use City Data. Our goal to promote civic engagement, innovation,

and economic opportunity leveraging The City of Chicago’s data.

Connect Chicago Meetup:

People who work to bring public computer centers, community

technology centers, and digital literacy programs to the people of

Chicago.

If you are part of a facility at http://locations.weconnectchicago.

org, this group is for you.

FreeGeekChicago OpenHack

OpenHack is held every Saturday and offers a space to work on

software projects with other hackers. Contribute to one of the

Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew projects or use our space to work

on your own creation.

Maptime Chicago:

Maptime Chicago is an interactive place to learn about digital

mapmaking and GIS in Chicago.

OrganizationsThese organizations work at the forefront of civic innovation in

Chicago.

Chicago Public Library• Led by Commissioner Brian Bannon

• www.chipublib.org

• Twitter: @ChiPubLIb

125

One of the first comprehensive technology training programs in the

city, the CyberNavigators program at Chicago Public Libraries has

led the way in bridging the digital divide in Chicago. The Chicago

Public Library also boasts it’s own MakerLab complete with a 3D

Printer.

City of Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology:

• Led by City of Chicago CIO Brenna Berman

• Data Portal: data.cityofchicago.org

• Twitter: @ChicagoCTO, @ChicagoCDO

The Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) was

introduced in 2008 to add innovation to the charter of the former

Department of Business and Information Services.

As the central information technology organization for the City,

DoIT provides a number of technology and telecommunications

services to departments, the Mayor, Aldermen, other city agencies,

residents, businesses and tourists.

The Department of Innovation and Technology is also

responsible for the city’s data portal.

Code for America

Code for America is a 501(c)3 non-profit that envisions a govern-

ment by the people, for the people, that works in the 21st century.

Our programs change how we participate in government by:

Connecting citizens and governments to design better services,

Encouraging low-risk settings for innovation; and, Supporting a

competitive civic tech marketplace.

Appendix


Data Analysts for Social Good

Data Analysts for Social Good is committed to providing the tools,

resources, and community to help social sector professionals use

research, data, and analytics think critically about social change.

Data Science for Social Good:

The Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good fellowship

is a University of Chicago summer program for aspiring data

scientists to work on data mining, machine learning, big data, and

data science projects with social impact.

FreeGeekChicago

FreeGeek Chicago is a not-for-profit community organization that

recycles used computers and parts to provide functional computers,

education, internet access and job skills training to those who want

them.

Knight Lab at Northwestern:

Northwestern University Knight Lab advances news media

innovation and education. Developing ideas from experimentation

through adoption, the Lab makes technology that aims to help

make information meaningful and promotes quality storytelling on

the Internet.

Illinois Science and Technology Coalition

The Illinois Science & Technology Coalition (ISTC) harnesses the

power of research and innovation to grow the state’s economy. We

are a member-driven, non-profit entity that drives public-private

partnerships between industry, research universities, federal labs

and government to increase research and technology-based invest-

ment, talent, awareness and job growth in Illinois.

127

LISC Chicago

Local Initiatives Support Corporation Chicago connects neighbor-

hoods to the resources they need to become stronger and healthier.

LISC has a number of programs that intersect in the civic innova-

tion space including the Smart Communities Program and their

OpenGov for the Rest of Us Program.

Open City Apps

OpenCity Apps is a volunteer civic apps team that creates apps

with open data to improve transparency and understanding of our

government.

Smart Chicago Collaborative:

Smart Chicago is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in

Chicago through technology. We work on increasing access to the

Internet, improving skills for using Internet, and developing mean-

ingful products from data that measurably contribute to the quality

of life of residents in our region and beyond.

UI Labs

UI LABS is a Chicago-based research and commercialization

collaborative, bringing Universities + Industries together to define

problems, design partnerships and deliver scalable solutions to

tomorrow’s most important challenges.

US Open Data Institute

Moving beyond the “Field of Dreams” model of releasing datasets,

we’re matching data producers and consumers to create sustainable

data ecosystems. We love government. We’re collaborating with

local, state, and federal agencies (at no cost to them) to help them

release data sets and promote their work. Before we even had a

Appendix


website, we had a GitHub repository. We’re creating, supporting,

and promoting software essential to the open data ecosystem

Civic StartupsCivic innovation in Chicago has reached a point where companies

fueled by open data are being formed to provide tools and data that

help tackle civic problems. Below are some of the companies that

are based in Chicago.

AlderTrak

Insight every weekday on the actions and elections of the 50 alder-

men, top city agencies, administrative commissions, their staff and

more.

CivicArtworks

Civic ArtWorks makes neighborhood design more accessible than

ever. Our online platform enables citizens to share new ideas and

concerns about their community with their neighbors. We remove

barriers and enable a fluid conversation between community mem-

bers and our expert planning and design staff. We strive to build

trust and encourage greater participation in order to generate a

vision for the future that truly reflects the values of the community.

This results in diagrams, plans, and illustrations that celebrate the

community’s input, inspire continued action, and lead to successful

implementation.

Chicago Cityscape

Chicago Cityscape is a tool that uses open data to show how, where,

and when neighborhood development takes place. Chicago City-

scape was founded by Steven Vance to simplify finding building

projects and the companies who do them using the city’s copious

open neighborhood development data.

129

CivicWhitaker, Inc

CivicWhitaker, Inc is a civic technology consulting firm based out

of Chicago, Illinois specializing in project management, research

and writing, digital storytelling event management and community

organizing all in the civic technology space. Their biggest client is

the Smart Chicago Collaborative which has been incubating the

company.

DataMade

DataMade is a civic technology company. We work on projects that

make open data, make open source software, and make people

more powerful.

Our projects adhere to the Three Os.

• Open data: The project uses data that is entirely open and free

to use by anyone.

• Open source: All apps and tools developed are open source and

released under an unrestrictive license.

• Open government: The project is civic-minded. It engages and

informs citizens about their society, city, or government.

EveryBlock

EveryBlock’s goal is to help you be a better neighbor by giving you

frequently updated neighborhood information, plus tools to have

meaningful conversations with neighbors.

The site is simple to use: create an account and choose which

places you’d like to follow — perhaps your home and your work-

place. Your custom EveryBlock homepage will be updated through-

out the day and show you what’s been happening near your fol-

lowed places, plus what people in those places are talking about.

Join in the neighborhood conversation when you’ve got something

to contribute — a question for your neighbors, a news report, an

Appendix


event listing, or just a heads-up about something people in your

neighborhood should know about.

Impact Engine

Impact Engine is an investment fund that empowers entrepre-

neurs, investors, and mentors to make a positive impact on society.

Through financial and human capital, we help for-profit businesses

address the world’s greatest social and environmental challenges.

Kalov Strategies

Kalov Strategies is a consulting firm headed by Josh Kalov. Kalov

Strategies is working with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to help

open up Cook County data.

mRelief

mRelief simplifies the qualifying process with an easy-to-use form

of 7.5 questions through our website application at mrelief.com and

our SMS application at 773-377-8946. After the user fills out the

necessary information, they are directed to community or govern-

ment resources based on their eligibility indicators and zip code.

Purple Binder

Purple Binder helps healthcare providers, cities, and non-profit or-

ganizations connect people with the resources they need to thrive in

their community. We collect community resource data and organize

it into directories that stay up to date.

Public Good Software

Public Good Software, Inc was founded on May Day by Chicago

startup vets Paul Smith, Dan Ratner, and Jason Kunesh along with

fellow Obama for America 2012 alumni Chris Gansen & Aaron

Salmon to help people working for the public good with great

131

software. As one of the first Benefit Corporation software startups,

we break new ground every day we roll up our shirtsleeves and get

down to it.

Rob Paral and Associates

Rob Paral and Associates help organizations deepen relationships

with their community.

We do this by providing new demographic, social and economic

information, and by determining attitudes, experiences and

program usage among the populations served by our clients.

OpenTech Strategies

OpenTech Strategies work to support collaborative open technolo-

gy ventures through project management, open source licensing,

development strategy, developer coaching, release processes, RFP

development and more.

SpotHero

SpotHero allows you to search and view available parking options

in and around the cities. By reserving your parking online ahead of

time through SpotHero, you know exactly how much you’re going

to pay, and where you’re going to park. You can view city parking

rates at different city parking garages on the map that are near the

address you’re searching for.

(SpotHero was also the winner’s of Chicago’s Apps for MetroCh-

icago Challenge)

Spott

Get more out of your social network by finding the answers you

need through the world around you.

• Ask questions and share information with Spott’s helpful

community using an intuitive location-based search.

Appendix


• Use your News Feed to browse what’s trending in your

neighborhood, city, or any other place of interest.

• Privacy is our priority. Spott does not reveal your current

location or ask for personal information.

Appendix B: Glossary of Civic Tech TermsOne of the quirks of both working in technology and the civic sec-

tors is that both sectors tend to use a lot of jargon and abbreviations

that make perfect sense in context, but can baffle outsiders.

As an organization that believes in collaboration, we end up do-

ing spending a lot of time translating and explaining the jargon.

Our partner, Code for America, has developed a tool for Slack

called Glossbot. Glossbot is a simple web app meant to be deployed

as a Slack integration. Code for America uses this to define the

jargon it comes across as they work so when they’re discussing

their work everyone can be caught up on the definitions. Of course,

this information is also useful for other civic technologists who run

across these terms as well.

We’ve taken a data dump from the bot and edited it to exclude

some California things and add some Chicago things. You can see

the raw information here. If your team uses Slack, you can also

deploy your own Glossbot by forking the code on Github. If you’re

looking for something in particular, you can also search by hitting

(Ctrl+F on Windows or Command+F on a Mac)

• 18f – A group within the U.S. General Services Administration

that builds digital services for government.

• ACCDB – A Microsoft Access database format.

• ADA – American with Disabilities Act; a set regulations re-

garding hiring practices, building codes, and other regulations

aimed at reducing discrimination towards disabled people.

133

• AFDC – Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a federal

assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996 created by the

Social Security Act and administered by the U.S. Department of

Health and Human Services that provided financial assistance

to children whose families had low or no income. Replaced by

the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

• AMD – Asynchronous Module Definition; a mechanism for

defining JavaScript modules such that the module and its

dependencies can be asynchronously loaded.

• ANT -Actor-Network Theory, an approach to social theory and

research, originating in the field of science studies, which treats

objects as part of social networks.

• API – Application Programming Interface, an interface that

exposes the data and functionality of an application to other

applications.

• AWS – Amazon Web Services. People can use AWS to host

their website on Amazon’s cloud servers instead of their own

physical ones. Smart Chicago also provides free hosting to

Chicago civic apps.

• bikeshedding – Parkinson observed that a committee whose

job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the

majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp

issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed,

while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is

far more important but also far more difficult to criticize con-

structively.

• BLUF – Bottom Line Up Front, a paragraph where conclusions

and recommendations are placed at the beginning of the text,

rather than the end, in order to facilitate rapid comprehension.

Appendix


• Broadband – Commonly referred to as High Speed Internet;

The FCC has recently updated its definition of broadband to

25 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 3 Mbps for

uploads.

• CBO – Community-Based Organization or the Congressional

Budget Office

• CFPB - Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent

agency of the United States government responsible for con-

sumer protection in the financial sector.

• City Analytics Dashboard – A CfA app that displays live activity

on a web site via Google Analytics

• Clean – An app built by Code for America’s Health Lab to

simplify and accelerate the process of applying for CalFresh.

• CMS – Content Management System used by websites which

publish a lot of content. A good example of this is WordPress or

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

• CRM – Customer Relationship Management used by organi-

zations that have a large sales function or non-profits that deal

with a lot of funders or grantees. Salesforce is an example.

• CUTgroup – Civic User Testing Group, a set of regular Chicago

residents who get paid to test out civic apps. This program has

been duplicated in other cities such as Oakland.

• Digital Services Census – The Local Digital Services Census

surveys the quality and usability of the 10 most searched-for city

services, as identified from research by the Code for America

Tech Team.

• DSL – Domain-Specific Language

• EBT – Electronic Benefit Transfer, the system used in by

states for the delivery, redemption, and reconciliation of issued

public assistance benefits. EBT cards go by different names in

different states.

135

• EHR – Electronic Health Record

• eRegs - eRegulations, a web-based application that makes

regulations easy to find, read and understand, developed by the

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

• ESL – English as a Second Language

• ETL – Extract, Transform, Load. The process that developers

and data scientists use to extract data from one system, trans-

form it, and load it into a different system. Cities like Chicago

use this to take data from their business systems and load it

into the data portal automatically. For a complete guide on ETL,

click here.

• FEC – Federal Election Commission, an independent regulato-

ry agency which regulates campaign finance legislation.

• FPL – Federal Poverty Level

• FOIA – Freedom of Information Act Request; Legal method

used to get information from governments. Can be time

consuming.

• GDS – Government Digital Service; An agency in the United

Kingdom, the Government Digital Service is leading the digital

transformation of government, making public services digital

by default, and simpler, clearer and faster to use. The GDS

provided the inspiration for the US’s 18F and USDS.

• GIS – Geographic Information Systems; Software used to

display geographic data such as ArcGIS. This term used to ref-

erence software made by ESRI, but now can refer to everything

from Google Maps, to OpenStreetMap, to CartoDB.

• GitHub – A web service used to host repositories of code and

make it easier for developers to collaborate using open source.

• GovDelivery – A marketing and communications firm that

works with federal, state and local governments on email

marketing campaigns and mailing list management.

Appendix


• Govtech Fund – A venture capital fund dedicated to govern-

ment technology startups.

• GSA - the U.S. General Services Administration, an indepen-

dent agency of the United States government, established

to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal

agencies.

• HIMSS – Healthcare Information and Management Systems

Society

• HIPAA- the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability

Act, U.S. legislation that ensures a person’s right to buy health

insurance after losing a job, establishes standards for electronic

medical records, protects the privacy of a patient’s health infor-

mation, and gives patients the legal right to access their own

health data.

• IPHI – Institute for Public Health Innovation

• Javascript – Javascript is a programming language used by

web browsers. It is not the same as Java which is a whole other

language.

• LAF / Legal Aid Foundation – A non-profit organization that

often does pro-bono work representing clients who can’t afford

legal counsel. See LAF Chicago.

• LEP – Limited English Proficient

• MindMixer – A platform allowing local governments to solicit

ideas from their communities and support a process for

implementing the best ones. A CfA 2012 Accelerator company.

• MOE – Maintenance Of Effort, often refers to requirements

that a government must meet to continue participating in a

federal program.

• Meaningful Use – Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive

Programs provide financial incentives for the “meaningful

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use” of certified EHR technology. To receive an EHR incentive

payment, providers have to show that they are “meaningfully

using” their certified EHR technology by meeting certain mea-

surement thresholds that range from recording patient infor-

mation as structured data to exchanging summary care records.

• NDoCH – National Day of Civic Hacking

NNIP – The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership

(NNIP) is a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local

partners to further the development and use of neighborhood

information systems in local policymaking and community

building.

• NSTIC – National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace,

a White House initiative to work collaboratively with the private

sector, advocacy groups, public sector agencies, and other orga-

nizations to improve the privacy, security, and convenience of

online transactions.

• Ohana API – An API that provides any city or county with an

open-source framework for opening up a dataset of communi-

ty-based organizations, and keeping the information up to date.

A 2013 San Mateo Fellows project.

• ONC – Office of the National Coordinator for Health Informa-

tion Technology. Part of the U.S. Department of Health and

Human Services, purpose is to support the adoption of health

information technology and the promotion of nationwide

health information exchange to improve health care.

• Open Data – Open data refers to data often released by govern-

ments that adheres to the 8 Principles of Open Data.

• Open Source – Open source software is software that can be

freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified

form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many peo-

ple, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open

Source Definition.

Appendix


• OSTP – White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

• PIF – Presidential Innovation Fellows <https://18f.gsa.gov/

pif/>

• R – R is a free software environment for statistical computing

and graphics. It’s used by data scientists to analyze data.

• Ruby – A dynamic, open source programming language with a

focus on simplicity and productivity. Often used in conjunction

with Ruby on Rails

• Ruby on Rails – Ruby on Rails is an open-source web frame-

work written in Ruby. It was created in Chicago from work that

David Heinemeier Hansson was doing for Basecamp.

• SMS – Short Messaging Service, a text messaging service com-

ponent of phone, Web, or mobile communication systems. It

uses standardized communications protocols to allow fixed line

or mobile phone devices to exchange short text messages.

• SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This

program is sometimes known as food stamps or by the name of

the card that people use to get benefits such as LINK or Cal-

Fresh.

• SSI – Supplemental Security Income, a Federal income supple-

ment program funded by general tax revenues.

• Streetmix – An interactive street section builder that helps

community members mockup the streets they’d like to live on

and offer these mockups as future plans for city officials and

planners. Built by 2013 fellows.

• Streetsblog – A transportation blog covering transportation and

bike issues.

• TANF – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal

program providing cash assistance to indigent families with

dependent children through the U.S. Department of Health and

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Human Services. Replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent

Children (AFDC) program.

• Twilio – A web service used to give apps the ability to send and

receive texts.

• USDA – United States Department of Agriculture

• UI – User interface; the parts of the website or app that users

use to get the information or results they want.

• UX – User Experience; Generally referring to designing website

and applications to make the user experience simple and easy

to use. Often means getting apps in front of real users.

• WIC – Women, Infants and Children Program, a federal-

ly-funded health and nutrition program that helps families by

providing checks for buying healthy supplemental foods from

WIC-authorized vendors, nutrition education, and help finding

healthcare and other community services.

• WordPress – WordPress is a blogging platform that can be used

as a content management system for websites. Its ease of use

makes it a popular platform.

Appendix


The Author

Christopher Whitaker runs the civic technology consulting firm

CivicWhitaker, which includes clients such as the Smart Chicago

Collaborative and Code for America. He utilizes his experience in

government and community organizing to advance civic innovation

in Chicago and beyond. Whitaker also serves as the co-host of Chi

Hack Night--one of the largest gatherings of civic technologists in

the country. He has been honored as a White House Champion of

Change for Civic Hacking. He is a graduate of DePaul University

(MPA) and Sam Houston State University (BA, Political Science).

Previously, Whitaker served with the US Army in Iraq as a mecha-

nized infantryman.

Whitaker tweets regularly at @civicwhitaker and calls Chicagoland

home.

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Daniel X. O’Neil is Executive Director of the Smart Chicago

Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to making lives better

in Chicago through technology. Prior to Smart Chicago, O’Neil

was a co-founder of EveryBlock, where he was responsible for

uncovering new data sets through online research and working

with local governments. He has worked in the open government/

open data movement since 2004, creating technology, advocating

for and writing policy, and working to improve how communities

use data to make decisions and improve conditions. Find him at

http://danielxoneil.com/.

The Editor

Christopher Whitaker was a consultant to the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology, from 2012 to 2015. Smart Chicago focuses on increasing access to the Internet, improving skills for using the Internet, and developing meaningful products from data that measurably contribute to the quality of life of residents in our region and beyond.

Together, we created a new job type— part documenter, part organizer, part evangelist, part original writer and thinker about an emerging subsector of the technology industry— civic tech.